My proof readers haven't told me to change a great deal about my draft essay, so that's good news. My referencing is still all over the place, however (which, one could argue, it should be, but preferably numbered correctly). I am uncertain as to how to proceed with the referencing, because at the moment, it uses a numbered referencing system, which I consider to be the best option for this for several reasons:
1) It is the least intrusive when reading the essay, allowing readers to pursue the reference if they want to, rather than the flow of sentences being interrupted by names and dates.
2) I have a large number of internet sources, which mean naming and dating the quotations proves difficult, and sometimes even unhelpful, as the majority of the sites will simply be cited as 2011, which is clear in my end-of-text reference anyway.
3) The main reason for referencing is to have a standardised way of referring to cited sources across a text. As my project combines sociological research with quotations from literature, neither the standard MLA nor Harvard referencing systems provide a consistently useful way of referencing; numbered citing is a way of avoiding this problem.
4) I already have an alphabetical list of sources, including my references, in the Bibliography.
I am going to have to ascertain over the next few weeks whether I can use the numbered referencing, which to me seems the intuitive method, or whether I will have to conform to other standardised methods due to the constraints of the project. Having professionalised my references section tonight, this is not the solution I am hoping for, put it that way.
It seems to me that referencing is a necessary evil, and I can now see why so many articles and books are badly sourced and referenced: mine's a 5000 word essay and references are proving long-winded, so how much time must a book's writer spend on their citations?
