ibid. et al.

It's all coming back now.

I've been struggling with this assignment. The reading was lengthy and then I had no idea where to start. Blank pages are scary. It's been a bit of a while since I last had to write a piece of scholarly work, but today everything was finally coming together.

Good thing, really, given that it's due this week.

I just had to reduce the text down to the required word limit and format all the references and viola, it would be done.

I always used to use in-text referencing. I hate the way it clutters the text, but it is easy to work with in the drafting process. Also, when I first started study all those years ago the dodgy word processing equipment couldn't do automatic footnotes that stayed on the same page and renumbered themselves when you added something in.

But in order to reduce my essay to the required length (and a quarter as much again has got to be too much), I decided to bung the excess text into footnotes for some of my discursive "by the way..." arguments and that was really wierd having both notes and in-text references.

So I decided to change to footnotes.

Then remembered the other reason that I never have liked noting.

To note effectively, one must remember what all the latin abbreviations stand for: ibid., op.cit., loc. cit., etc.

And once I'd finished I had MORE words than I'd started with.

The chance I'd unchecked the box that said, "include end and footnotes"
... Approximately None!