Being an Apprentice Among Scholars: When Not to Mention Things

        Pay close attention to facts and concepts your sources use without citation.  They establish the "foundation" of the whole performance, the knowledge and reasoning considered so widely known that it belongs to nobody in particular.  Sometimes, the clues are obvious to common sense, but we are influenced by non-scholarly narrative styles from popular media like television documentaries and news reports, which routinely assume their audiences have no better than a high-school education.  That leads them to believe they are delivering rare and valuable information when they tell their audiences "The English playwright, William Shakespeare, wrote his great tragedy, King Lear, based on sources he found in old chronicles (early histories) and other poets' plays."  The underscored words in that sentence are obvious without needing to be said to any scholar, or even to any student who has passed the basic 200-level survey courses required for English majors.  A scholar might use some of that information in a dependent clause to frame a more original sentence, but the effect would be less like an unwelcome redundant lecture and more like a gentle, contextualizing reminder: "When Shakespeare turned to the chronicles and earlier plays upon which he based the plot of King Lear, he made choices which . . . [and straight into the author's thesis...].  Some background information also can be "parked" in an endnote if it does not pass the subtle test of immediate relevancy to the best readers. 

        Think about a more common experience of "immediate relevancy to the best readers" when you react to someone trying to give you directions on the street. If the directions include very much irrelevant information, you will forget (or lose interest in!) the directions, and the communication will fail.  When in doubt, consider asking your instructor "would you need to be told this?"  The answer, and the reasons for the answer, might be among the most important things you learned that day, because they would help you understand better where the borders of your discipline are located.  Your goal is to serve your readers' immediate needs, but not to get in their way.

        In academic writing, the rule of serving the readers' immediate needs also helps explain some basic citation format rules.  Because all academic writing is presumed to be written by scholars for scholars, general, never, ever, prefix the introduction of a secondary source with a flattering title like, "The scholar, Stephen Greenblatt" (who else would a scholar like you be writing about?).  Similarly, you should almost never drag the titles of books or articles into your own prose when you refer to the source, like this: "Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare (Chicago: U Chicago P, 1980) argues that..."!  Notice how the sentence gets lost in the out-of-place citation?  The one exception to that rule against mentioning titles in the body of the paper would be a paper about a series of publications that were being compared with one another, especially if the language of their titles illuminate the nature of their relationship or dispute with one another.  For all other in-text references, use the MLA's parenthetical in-text citation format, like this (Greenblatt 283).   That single word and page number directs readers to your Works Cited section where they expect to see "Greenblatt" hanging out in the left margin, in alphabetical order, where your hanging indents placed it for their convenience.  While we're at it, never, ever store your Works Cited in a file separate from the paper in which the works are [ahem] cited--this would require your readers to assemble your paper for you, never a good idea, and it begs the obvious question of where the heck the works were cited if WC is a stand-alone document!

        Some scientific disciplines, like Biology, use a more formal style which repeats the commonly known definitions of a species or the well-documented facts about a process.  The rhetoric of scientific writing is so strictly structured that every section of such "report" is given a predictable name and contains predictable kinds of evidence.  See these "how to" pages constructed by Arnold Sanders for the Goucher Writing Center with the help of Esther Gibbs (Chemistry) and Janet Shambaugh (Biology).   For slightly less formally structured example from an online site run by the Center for Nonproliferation Studies (Monterey Institute), click here for Michelle Baker and Margaret E. Kosal's article on osmium tetroxide, an exotic chemical which might have been considered by terrorists for a "dirty bomb" plot discovered in 2004.  Although the document is intended for experts in the field, the compound is described in its most basic details in the forth paragraph, but notice how the introductory clause positions this "reminder" information so that readers can skip over it if they do not need to be reminded: "Scientists are already familiar with the use and effects of osmium tetroxide (OsO₄) . . . " (Baker and Kosal).  Baker and Kosal's thesis compares the evidence of the chemical's toxicity with other evidence of its instability and the difficulties this would pose for would-be terrorists, concluding that, though dangerous, it is an unlikely choice for terrorism when compared with other dangerous chemicals.  That original contribution to the chemical data and the information on the terrorists' methods is located where scientists typically put their original thinking, at the end of the report in a section they subtitled "Conclusions."