STYLE GUIDE: CLST 450 Winter 2017
CLST 450 CITATION AND STYLE GUIDE
The Writing Proficiency (WP) credit designation carries certain requirements and expectations, among which one finds the following statement: In writing proficiency courses, students learn the writing style and conventions of their disciplines, as well as the techniques for integrating evidence into scholarly papers. Every academic discipline has its own writing style and conventions. English, for example, tends to follow the MLA (Modern Language Association) style, while History follows the Chicago or Turabian style, and Biology follows the CBE Manual. Different classical journals and associations use different styles: the main American association, the Society for Classical Studies (formerly the American Philological Association), publishes the Transactions of the American Philological Association (TAPA) and with it the TAPA Style Guide. This course will follow the style and conventions of the TAPA style; this document outlines important points of that style and gives a few other pointers on good academic prose. Two appendices give you a wealth of abbreviations that you may wish to use.
Primary and Secondary Sources
Primary sources are ancient texts (speeches, histories, dialogues, plays, verses, novels, inscriptions, etc.). They were written in Latin and ancient Greek by ancient Romans and ancient Greeks who lived in antiquity and have been dead for a long time now. Secondary sources are modern scholarly works (articles, chapters, and monographs) written about ancient texts and the ancient world. Secondary sources interpret primary sources. You want to use recently written secondary sources so that you take the current state of scholarship into consideration: a paper full of references to books written in the seventies will come across as stale and out of touch with modern academic thought. The authors of your secondary sources should still be alive for the most part: try to stick to the twenty-first century as much as possible. Tertiary sources are compiled from primary and secondary sources. Timelines and encyclopedia entries are tertiary sources. You would never cite a tertiary source in a paper, since they do not provide an in-depth examination of any subject. When writing a research paper in classics, you write about primary sources by making arguments that also build upon or refute secondary sources. For example, you might write a paper about Vergil’s Aeneid (a primary source). In that paper, you would refer to scholarly articles and books (secondary sources) written recently about Vergil’s Aeneid, and you would draw upon those secondary sources when making arguments about how to interpret the primary source. In general, you will want to quote and discuss primary sources, but paraphrase or just briefly mention and discuss secondary sources.