Gutenberg9443@aol.com wrote:
We do not have to know the specific page number if we're quoting the Bible or Shakespeare. That can be carried over to other texts as well. (I hope my underlining shows up in all email.)
Bib entry:
Richardson, Samuel. Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded. orig. pub. 1740-1741. n.p.: Project Gutenberg, n.d.
footnote or endnote:
Richardson. Pamela. Section IV, Letter VII, par. 4.
Would not this serve most purposes?
Theoretically, perhaps, but I think it has some practical shortcomings. 1) It assumes that the person making the reference and the people looking up the reference all agree on how to count paragraphs. Usually it's straightforward, but if the source has display quotes, poetry (with stanzas), epigraphs, footnotes, etc, people will probably make different assumptions about how to count them. 2) Some cases would require you to count a lot of paragraphs. Consider a chapter in a novel, with lots of conversational dialogue. The number of paragraphs could easily get into the hundreds. A reference like "Chapter 5, par. 157" might be rather discouraging. (The Bible, and some editions of Shakespeare, avoid these problems by putting the numbering system explicitly in the text.) -Michael