Did you write papers in high school? [Added: Special Accommodations?]

We wrote a lot of papers in high school. fwiw, I had about 120 in my graduating class (1987) and at least 25 of us went to UNC, and may have been closer to 30. This didn’t count kids who went to Duke (2), Michigan (1), Ga Tech (1), Wake (1), and one of our very best students who went to App State because she got a full ride.
I much preferred classes at UNC where the tests were essay.
 
donbosco said:
A senior thesis for example?

Did you enter college knowing how to create a footnote citation? A bibliographical citation? Did you know that newspaper and book titles should be italicized and book chapters and articles are placed inside of quotation marks? Did you know that punctuation belongs inside of a quotation some 99.9% of the time?

I graduated from a pretty lowly-rated rural North Carolina high school and I knew those things but that was back in 1976. I also wrote several papers including a senior thesis (IIRC it was 25 pages long and included footnotes and a bibliography).

Note that I am approaching a rant but then that usually happens during exam and final grading time.
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Yes — wrote a lot of papers and a term paper junior year and a longer one senior year. Filling 25 TYPED pages plus citations seemed Herculean then — my dad paid his secretary to type it for me b/c our type writer was so old and it was a lot cheaper than buying a new typewriter much less a new fangled word processor or computer. Had to use MLA. Citations were graded.

What pissed me off was that we had to have an individual hand-written notecard for each citation, including writing out the quotation used. What a fucking waste of time. I kept my notes in a notebook and made the cards after finishing the paper.
 
nycfan said:
Yes — wrote a lot of papers and a term paper junior year and a longer one senior year. Filling 25 TYPED pages plus citations seemed Herculean then — my dad paid his secretary to type it for me b/c our type writer was so old and it was a lot cheaper than buying a new typewriter much less a new fangled word processor or computer. Had to use MLA. Citations were graded.

What pissed me off was that we had to have an individual hand-written notecard for each citation, including writing out the quotation used. What a fucking waste of time. I kept my notes in a notebook and made the cards after finishing the paper.
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I became intimately familiar with the AP Stylebook in college and the Bluebook (legal style book) in law school. Glad not to have to care much about formal styles or citation formats as a transactional attorney.
 
Y'all know what else?

Author names are not reversed in footnotes -- only in bibliographies. That is because footnotes are sorted by being numbered and the sources referenced in bibliographies are sorted by author's last names.

That's pretty simple, even straightforward, right?

I'm talking Chicago/Turabian Style. Notes-Bibliography not Author-Date.
 
And the placement of footnote superscript numerals?

Quotation: In a lengthy introduction, the translators of German Popular Stories describe a desire to reintroduce the fairy-tale to an English audience, who seem to have lost connection with storytelling4. There is a small selection of thirty to forty of the tales the Grimms had collected and published by this point, accompanied by charming illustrations from artist George Cruikshank. Beyond an insight into the reception to the tales, the translators include reference notes and quotes from the brothers themselves.5 End Quotation.

Above the author placed the footnote numeral incorrectly and then one sentence later did so correctly. This happens to a maddening degree.
 
One of my regrets is that starting in like 5th grade I was put is "oh these kids are real smart , put them in English classes where their creativity can flourish classes" So in those classes we skipped a lot of the basics . My parents had a really good command of the "basics" so most of what I learned was from listening. That is different
Of course at this point I just work hard at not having really embarrassing typos-and 50% of the time I succeed as seen from my posts
 
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