The Turabian Deposit

Remember -- you read about it first here:

I was at a Doctoral Committee meeting this afternoon where we indulged in another round of therapeutic commiseration about the difficulties of proofreading doctoral theses for correct Turabian format. Not only is it a time-consuming process, but there is also the question of who is responsible to do it. It is not unheard of for the duties normally belonging to a document fellow to be lodged somewhere in the library where the librarian must become the angel with the flaming pen to guard the gates of decent punctuation.

Today, though, I was struck with an inspiration: Charge all hopeful doctoral candidates a Turabian Deposit equal to $2 per page of their submitted dissertation. For every page with a formatting error, the dissertation reader gets to keep the $2; for every page without a formatting error, the $2 gets returned to the student. This would serve three purposes:

• It would incite students to exert real effort at proofreading.
• It would help keep dissertations down to a manageable length.
• It would provide some remuneration for what is usually an underpaid privilege.

"But," you say, "what about the dissertations without any formatting errors? Who would pay the reader then?" Somehow, I do not think that will be a serious problem.

Personal Bibliographic Management Software

I regularly get requests for recommendations from students who are interested in a Personal Bibliographic Management (PBM) program to help them format notes and bibliography pages in Turabian format.

I admit that I sometimes have trouble seeing the attraction of these products. I find many of the full-featured versions rather complex to use, much more complex than simply learning the rules for the style in the first place. I am enough of a geek, though, to appreciate the joy of inputting a lot of tedious data and then letting the computer miraculously format it according to style. And if you are working on a large project like a dissertation, you can benefit from the note-taking and organizing aspects of most full-featured PBMs.

Beware, however: PBM software is no substitute for knowing the appropriate style guide. If you do not know the citation style, you will not be able to evaluate how well the software is performing. A PBM is only as good as its programming, and like most things, you generally get what you pay for.

All that being said, I have put together a web page with a list of available PBM programs. I have included a list of four recommended free programs that will be adequate for the average student term paper. If fussing with a PBM is more fun for you than fussing with a bibliography page, you may enjoy experimenting with some of these programs. Bon Bibliographie!