I am, as you will doubtless have gathered, a pedant – a term which is actually less synonymous with ‘academic’ than you might expect. This manifests itself in many ways, the most obvious being an obsession with the defining of key terms and the potential abuse of words with a range of connotations, and a tendency to fetishise referencing and bibliography. Of course, justifying the former is easy – concepts shape thought, so slipshod or naive conceptualisation is a sign that the thought doesn’t need to be taken too seriously – and one could produce a reasonable argument that scrappy, incomplete and/or inconsistent referencing is a clear sign of lack of care in the work as a whole. But this is actually a tribal thing; this is how I recognise people of like mind and similar values, and in the case of students it is how I identify those with the right sort of qualities and spirit. The amount of ink I spill on correcting random capitalisation in book titles, inconsistent provision of publication details and the like is fully explained once it is recognised as an exercise in separating lambs from kids. I have always made it clear to my students that what really matters is consistency, whatever system they choose to adopt, and that is true – but most of them are smart enough to realise that there are preferred formats within which to to be consistent, and less favoured approaches. This doesn’t affect the marks I give, or even the feedback; I suppose it’s possible that the tone of my voice may vary slightly when talking to a student who has shown themselves to be on the side of the angels, for by the Harvard name:date system shall ye know them…
This year, the Faculty has devised an exquisite form of torture especially for me: all students must now follow the MHRA Guidelines on Referencing (Modern Humanities Research Association). Now, I disagree with this decision on principle – given that there is no standard system in academic publishing, so students will have to navigate through numerous different formats, what is the sense in requiring them to adopt a single approach in their own work? – but the particular choice of system causes me actual aesthetic anguish. It mandates things that I think are actively bad, and ugly. It uses up words, by insisting on giving full references in footnotes as well as bibliography, that students might otherwise use to expand their arguments; it thus inadvertently discourages the inclusion of lots of references, which would otherwise be considered a good thing. On top of this, because I’ve never used this system, I’m having to devote time to learning it so that I can mark students’ work correctly – and so far am failing in this: I’ve just had to send out an email to one class, apologising for the fact that I may have corrected things that are perfectly acceptable according to these stupid guidelines. I don’t actually think it’s acceptable for a footnote to give just the name of the author, the page number and nothing else, but apparently MHRA does. What strange, twisted people they must be.
Does this matter? I suppose it is a salutary lesson, for all of us, that life is full of pointless rules and expectations to which we have to conform because we have to. I am simply experiencing the imposition of an alien system by a higher power in exactly the same way as generations as students experienced it from me. I will, in time, learn to pass over an MHRA-approved footnote without wincing. Perhaps my soul will become so deadened that I’ll start using them myself. At present, however, it feels as if the sheep have seized power and are requiring everyone to put on a woolly fleece, whereas we goats were quite happy for everyone to do their own thing so long as we got to feel a secret solidarity with other goats. My inclination, of course, is to forget to apply the guidelines strictly so long as a student has been clear and consistent in their referencing, but I don’t think there’s any way I can actually communicate this to them without appearing to undermine Faculty rules. Which is not something I would ever want to do. Honestly. Even if they give me toothache.
Sphinx 
When I did my thesis, back in the Olden Days (WordPerfect 5.1 for DOS and its dreadful Greek Language Module), I was defiantly tweedy about it, and ‘op cits’ and ‘ibids’ abounded. Aside of my view that Classicists should be drawn to customs which give some premium to the knowledge of Latin, I found it time-honoured and elegant, qualities at enmity with the ugliness, vulgarity and stupidity with which we are at war. Floreant mores maiorum.
MRHA ? Medical and Healthcare Regulations Agency? Men’s Royal Hockey Association? Please don’t assume that the general reader of your blog knows what this abbreviation refers to. Or is it that you’d prefer not to have any general readers of your blog?
Sorry! This was written in a tremendous hurry and a bad temper, so not entirely thought through and not properly proof-read. It’s actually the MHRA not the MRHA (will now correct that in the text), and that stands for Modern Humanities Research Association. I’d point you in the direction of their website, but it doesn’t seem to be working at the moment. The organisation is best known for having produced this guide to referencing, hence references to MHRA within academic don’t normally need too much explanation.
“concepts shape thought, so slipshod or naive conceptualisation is a sign that the thought doesn’t need to be taken too seriously”. Perhaps the silliest remark I have yet read on this excellent blog.
Would you elaborate? That was written as a bit of a self-caricature, rather than as a definitive statement for which I’d man the barricades rather than qualify it in any way, but at the same time I do think there is a serious problem with any analysis, historical or otherwise, that depends on taking it for granted that a complex, even ambiguous concept with a long history is actually perfectly straightforward and doesn’t need even to be discussed.
I think we are probably in general agreement and I would never advocate taking concepts for granted, certainly, but I paused for a moment on the notion that things that aren’t appropriately framed are or should not taken too seriously. I think there are plenty of things (within and beyond academic discourse) that may fail the Morley test but are actually well worth serious thought. You may even have discussed some such in previous blogposts.
More worrying – and I appreciate that this is the caricature element at play – is the rhetoric: ‘slipshod or naive’ sounds a little Olympian to me. I know this article is centred on your self-confessed pedantry, but… Tending towards the Hugh Lloyd-Jones school (how could someone who needs/reads a translation of Sophocles have anything to offer to the study of Greek tragedy?) – likewise how could anyone who doesn’t abide by my (admirable, for sure, and for certain purposes) strictures vis-a-vis conceptualisation have anything to offer my idea of scholarship?
A goodly proportion of published scholarship, to say nothing of undergraduate writing, is vitiated by what you would dismiss – and yet both professional and neophyte work in classics and ancient history (and, good Lord, beyond) is, nevertheless, full of things worth examining. By operating under such restriction, is there a danger of, at best, missing out on things, or, at worst, perpetuating methodologies and praxeis that stifle/silence those who want to think and write a little differently?
Anyway, as a pedantic narcissist myself, I really enjoy reading the blog, and I absolutely support your comments on the idiotic referencing regs. I just hope your students don’t read your blog. The poor wee lambs would be shocked.
Fair point, especially the extent to which this offers a distorted mirror image of the attitude of old-school philology. Probably most things would fail the Morley test in those terms, including much of my own work. I would not actually dismiss it, even if that’s the impression given; I might get annoyed with it, at having to work harder in reading it, having to do much of the author’s work for them – just as a philologist might resent having to re-do translations in order to evaluate an argument. There is, potentially, a distinction between a piece that doesn’t worry about concepts because that’s not its main focus and one which seeks to engage with conceptual issues without actually thinking them through (I’m currently working on things to do with the ancient city and urbanism, and this is not as infrequent as it ought to be), just as there is a distinction between a general literary analysis that rests on dodgy translation and an analysis that purports to examine the original language but simply isn’t up to it – but in either case I’m very ready to admit that there will be other things in there worth thinking about.
I definitely wouldn’t apply these demands to student work. Goodness knows whether any of them read this, or what they think about it – though I did write this particular piece with a vague hope that they might read it and realise that I’m not going to make a fuss if they ignore some of these new rules on referencing, provided they are then clear and consistent.