Tutor beth: citation and footnotes

Please choose only one of the fairy tales;

1) Beauty and the Beast

2) Goldilocks and the three bears.

3) Three little pigs

4) Cindrella

5) Little red riding hood.

We all understand that fairy tales have what I’ll refer to as a fable quality—that is to say, they endeavor to teach us something—some ethical, moral or life lesson of wisdom. In the past weeks during lecture, I’ve described the principle of convincing your audience to take some action or to believe something as your purpose ; i.e., remember the three elements of prewriting including a discovery of topic , an analysis of audience , and a statement of purpose .

After you’ve read the fairy tale, distill its purpose , or fable quality from the story. What lesson are you being encouraged to understand or what quality are you to engender as a result of having digested the tale? Reduce the story’s purpose to a single statement or sentence that you write down.

Citations can be utilized to convey a “message within a message.” If you’re like me, you previously thought of the use of citations, quite simply, as something we refer to in order to bolster and support our contentions. In other words, the use of citations makes our work more credible. Nothing could be closer to Lanham’s described C-B-S model of writing, than the use of a citation in this way. The information contained in a standard APA citation, includes: author’s name, source of publication (journal title, e.g.), title of publication, date of publication, publisher name, location of publisher (city/state), and page numbers.

But I’d like you to think of how your use of citations may be influential in nature—that you may either support, or damage a claim made within an essay, by using nothing other than a citation. For example, if you included a citation in your paper on the topic of global warming from a source written in 1995, what would that citation indicate about the viability of the information you’ve cited? Well, it’s old information about global warming. How relevant can it be? Conversely, you cite information in your essay on global warming from a source written by the International Climatology Institute in 2011. What message does that citation send?

Your task is to convey a message to your audience, by including nothing but footnoted citations in the fairy tale you’ve selected and read . To be clear, you should first decide what your purpose is going to be.

EXAMPLE : Let’s say that I’ve chosen the 3 Little Pigs as my story. I’ve decided that the fable quality message of the original tale is that hard work pays off—that’s what the story tries to convince me of—that’s its purpose . INSTEAD, I decide that I want to prove that the pig who made the first house out of straw, is in fact, NOT LAZY at all, as the original story suggests. I must accomplish the task of changing the fable’s message, using nothing other than the inclusion of footnotes and citations. Look at the example to follow:

** Red indicates original text of the fable—you will note, I have not changed that narrative, I’ve only ADDED footnotes and citations (in blue).

Three Little Pigs

Once upon a time there were three little pigs and the time came for them to leave home and seek their fortunes.

Before they left, their mother told them “Whatever you do, do it the best that you can because that's the way to get along in the world.

The first little pig built his house out of straw because it was the easiest thing to do.

Notice that my first citation keyed in on the word “time” above. Implicitly, I want to convey that pig number 1 was not taking advantage of his mother; rather, that he was only 3 weeks old when he had to be responsible and leave. According to my citation, and the inference we draw from the title, the pig was young and self sufficient; therefore, piglet number 1 was not lazy .

In FN2, the word keyed in on (or footnoted) was “told.” When coupled with the subsequent word “best,” I can use these both to help to establish that piglet number 1 was not lazy provided that he listened to his mother’s advice. See my citation below. Notice how the date, credentials of the author, title, publisher, and even number of pages contributes to the message.

Finally, in FN3, I want to close in for the kill and suggest that building grass huts isn’t easy. So, I research an article that I can cite to support my sub-textual message—that piglet number 1 isn’t lazy … See below. I’ve found a citation with 2 authors (better than 1 right?). The publication is contemporary and credible (by source). The title of the publication implies that native tribes are no longer building grass huts as routinely as they once did because the practice is too laborious and time consuming—that they have turned their favor toward prefab construction—even with all the difficulties of getting those prefab materials delivered to their remote jungle regions. Note also that more than 75 pages are devoted to explaining this phenomenon in full detail.

While you will eventually engage in this type of work using your actual essays with REAL citations, for now, I’d like you to proceed as follows:

(1) Choose a fairy tale, diagnose its original purpose, or fable quality.

(2) Decide on what purpose you’d like to achieve. Your purpose must be different than the purpose of the original story.

(3) Go through the story, and find those individual words in the fairy tale that are crucial to the development of the story’s own purpose; e.g., in The Three Little Pigs, the word “easiest” was necessary to the story’s purpose of trying to establish that the little pig was lazy, or not working hard. You’ll need to find all of these types of words within the story. These are the words that you’re going to have to figure out how to change the audience’s perception of, just as I did in the examples above.

(4) On those words you identified in number three, figure out what type of citation and footnote you would need to insert in order to help change the word’s meaning from the original, to a meaning more closely aligned with your purpose as you developed in step two.

(5) You should repeat step 4, using a total of at least 10 footnotes and citations. Five of the citations may be fake, as in my examples on page 2, but five of the citations must be real, peer reviewed material that you research and find in the SJSU King Library.

(6) Your final “product” will be to submit the original fairy tale story, that has been augmented using only footnotes and 10 citations. This means, of course, that you will not be writing your own essay. You are only trying to see whether you can change your audience’s understanding of one of these classic fairly tales, simply by footnoting and citing it.

� Smith, Anderson. (2009). Pig maturation: left to their own devices at 3 weeks. Journal of Animal Husbandry, 45(7), 23-45.

� Rangel, Dr. Pierce. (2011). A comprehensive scientific study of animal behavior: mammals don’t think, they listen. Center for Mammalian Research. Bedford St. Martins, Chapters 12 – 14.

� Vega, C., & Tish, P. (2010). Why the indigenous tribes of Papua New Guinea are abandoning the grass hut in favor of prefabrication. Digest of Tribal Populations, 24(1), 1 – 75.