Someone was telling me that when I use a quote to say something like:
You can do references in-text, as giving a brief quote from "Johnson," then, at the end of the quote, have (Johnson 2004, p. 12). Then at the end of the book have a bibliography where you give all the bibliographic detail.
But I told him that the great majority of non-fiction books I've read have a more casual method. In fact, the first book I pulled off the shelf is a book called
Little Bets by Peter Sims. It's published by Free Press, which is a division of Simon & Schuster. Here's the first quoting I paged to: (pg 53) (and the word in parentheses I'm changing because I don't want to get censored--lol)
The use of prototypes, often the rougher the better, also greatly facilitates overcoming the blank-page problem. Novelist Anne Lamott believes that every good writer writes what she calls
(lousy) first drafts. "The only way I can get anything written at all is to write really, really (lousy) first drafts," Lamott writes in
Bird by Bird. Just get it down on paper, she recommneds. Write like a child, whatever comes to your mind. "All good writers write them. This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts."
The italics are the author's. There are no foot or end notes. There is no bibliography at the end of the book.
Then a paragraph later Sims writes a block paragraph that is in the flow of his talking about Lamott so the reader assumes it's also from Bird by Bird but he makes no attribution whatsoever.
Now I'm not holding this guy up as doing the referencing ideally, but I am holding him up as what most non-fiction books (that are not academic in nature) that I read are like.
If this passes Simon & Schuster's test, don't you think it would be okay for me?
