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]

If you say "Krishna is often depicted as blue" in an art history class, and you've just finished a set of slides showing just that, you don't need to cite it.

Esmenet, this. What citations are is giving evidence for why you just said X. If you've gone through a whole bunch of pictures of Krishna being blue, that *is* the evidence, you don't need to back it up further. Footnotes are (simplistically) substituting in for the pictures with "it says so here, here, and here."

(Branchandroot, thank you for putting it more clearly than I could wrap my fingers around, and pull me up if you think I'm getting off-course.)

[branchandroot]

*tips hat* My pleasure!