Lightly edited from a recent email:
Here’s the revised version. Rather than just including linked references [in that middle section as you suggested], I actually expanded that section so that it was clear who I was citing and what I was claiming they said.
Citations work for science types but I want to learn (create? promote?) a new way of including references for popular literature in which, rather than saying something like, “Scientists think it’s OK to start sentences with a conjunction [Wolfram 2002].” I instead want to say things like, “In the foreword of his mammoth tome A New Kind of Science, computer scientist Stephen Wolfram defends starting sentences with conjunctions, arguing forcefully that it makes long, complex arguments easier to read.”
Yes, it’s longer, but it’s more honest, and the [cite] style was aimed at scientific papers with enormously compressed length requirements. Tell me what you think.
What do you think about the use of citations in non-scientific literature? I think we can do better. I’m just not sure what it is yet. Textbooks have generally solved this problem with “info boxes,” but that’s not always appropriate.
-the Centaur
