Conventions

Spanish shutters
I don’t like to use my blog to rant, but prompted by an email from Colin (who seems to share my views) I feel moved to write about referencing conventions, house styles and so on. This isn’t an attempt to get at anybody or anything – just to raise some issues. Yesterday I spent a fair amount of time re-formatting references in APA. In that world everything is different - where I use quotation marks they don’t; where I normally italicise they don’t; where I use pp. they don’t; where they use brackets I don’t etc. etc. ad nauseam. I now know exactly what the student who comes from another institution feels like! But the real point I want to make is about who’s responsibility this should be. Providing all the right detail is there isn’t this a copy editor’s job – a task of making our work conform to house style? Given that we do the spade work and get little recompense for it, I think we get soundly ripped off. (End of rant.)