I still don't understand citations.

[esmenet]

I probably shouldn't use this journaling platform as a place to ask ridiculously obvious questions that everybody else in the ENTIRE WORLD knows the answer to, but Google is no help and neither is my mom.

R-list, please tell me how citations actually work. I get the superscript-number-leading-to-footnote-with-source-info bit, but not what needs to be cited. I mean, if I'm talking about a specific event that I got out of a specific book, that needs one, but what about 'white usually symbolizes purity' or 'Krishna is blue'?

Comments

[chalcopyrite]

Mmm, citations. ♥

You're allowed to assume your readers have basic/common information -- basically, did it take special time and attention paid to this subject to find this? So, for instance, "The Earth is round" does not need to be footnoted; "The Earth has X particular curvature at this point" does.

[esmenet]

Mmm. So it's the difference between something you know and something you went looking for? Then I could just say "white tends to symbolize purity" (just before citing a bunch of religions where it does) or "you can't talk about religion without talking about light", but would need to cite "(colour x) usually symbolizes (things y) in (religion z)"?

[chalcopyrite]

I fear I was not as useful as I could have been. Hmm. It's not quite what you know vs. what you went looking for: for example, you might have been really interested in the Arthurian legends when you were a kid, so read a lot of/about them. That is now just Stuff You Know, but it's *not* something you can assume everyone else knows. So if you're using that knowledge, you need to cite it -- it does not need to come from the same source you found it in, just a source.

(I think we are running into different uses of "cite" here -- "give examples" and "detail source" are getting mixed up.)

How about this: if you make statements like "white generally symbolizes purity," you don't need to footnote that *particular* statement, but you DO need to back it up, with specific examples, and those DO need to be cited. "White symbolizes purity" is something you are (I assume) taking as a building block for your further argument in the paper, so you need to show that it's solid and you have justification for building on it.

Similarly if you want to talk about light in the discussion of different religions, as in it comes up a lot (but srsly, do not say things like "you can't talk about religion without talking about light," because that is asking for your very first reader to come along and say SURE YOU CAN), give examples, say where you found them. Likewise "(colour x) usually symbolizes (things y) in (religion z)", give examples, where you found them. You don't have to go into the examples at length, they can even be part of the footnote.

Basically, white tends to symbolize purity and you can't talk about religion without talking about light are both arguments you are making, and you need to show how you got there.

If you are using, say, modern Western Christianity as an example, and you are a modern, Western Christian writing to a similar audience, you can get away with it. But even there, if you can come up with where you got this, and it can be "light was used as an illustration of divine whatever in Mr/s X's third-grade Sunday School," it is better.

(BTW, what sort of level is this paper being written for? I mean, are we talking high school, first year of college, college upperclass? Just so I can maybe be more useful.)