I'm currently working on a horrible article for a horrible book. Everything in it is boring, rambly, didactic, scholarly fluff. No real insights or relevant information. Everything in it so far has felt like different professors' ramblings on their pet subjects. Even the best of these articles drive me nuts.
But the current one is special. It's twenty-seven pages of text, and there was no discernible thesis statement until page 25. Even then, it was a pretty weak and uninteresting thesis. It didn't even connect to the rest of the paper, which was all rambling historical overview. It's mostly just quotes stitched together with comments lacking in insight.
But wait—it gets better! None of the quotes have their own citation. He just takes all the references for an entire paragraph and lumps them into one note. There are times when such citations are appropriate. It cleans up the clutter of excessive notes and spares the reader from having to wade through pages upon pages of citations. But it's generally not good for a whole paper, especially when it causes confusion and doesn't decrease the clutter by much.
So now I get to go through and separate all the notes. When there are at least a few quotes in each paragraph, it becomes a very tedious task consisting of comparing the copy of the source to the quote, adding in the new numbers, deleting the old one, writing the new number on the source copy, and separating the notes themselves. Oh, and he obviously doesn't know how to do short-form citations, so I'm having to fix all of those by adding in the name of the book. I really think they should charge the author for all this extra work. And maybe pay me extra for it.
It's going to be a long day at work. For the next week.
*sigh*
