Fear and Footnoting in America

Footnotes scare me.

I majored in Construction Management and minored in Business so I admit that I avoided them greatly. I can only remember writing one paper in college. It was a masterful piece on the force vectors within a moment reaction. I can tell you that I did not get an F(only because UK used E, which I got). One reason was that I did not cite a single source. In my defense, I didn't use any. No baby, that E was all mine.

My college professors made it sound as if plagiarism is worse than murder. I was so scared to "bite"(Cube, Ice. 1989) something from someone else that I refused to use anything from someone else.

My problem with footnotes is because I never know when to or not to use them. I have been taking a Saturday class recently in which I had to write a paper. The paper was on the book "The Soul Winner" by Charles Spurgeon. It was required to cite sources.

Footnotes scare me.

I had absolutely no idea when to draw the line on footnotes. I found myself wanting to footnote the word "The" each time I used it...I mean it was in the book. Charles Spurgeon had used the word "The" countless times and I was going to use the word "The" in my paper on his book. Not to mention other words he used that I blatantly plagiarized. "A", "Is", "It", "For", and the list could go on and on.

I am such a fraud.

I actually think it is ridiculous to have to footnote anyway. I mean would anyone actually accuse me of coming up with anything? Let's face it, a blanket statement at the end of any paper that says something like, "The views, ideas, facts, similies, homilies, words, typos, considerations, misspellings, and contradictions contained in the above work are most likely the intellectual property of someone else that has lived within the last six thousand years and not necessarily that of the author,"(Cornett,N. 2006).

Well,that's all I got to say about that(Gump,F. 1994).


The thoughts, words, letters, spaces, etc. contained herein are hereby declared the intellectual property of the author and cannot be reproduced without expressed written consent...unless you give me credit in a footnote.