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

As Michael Dyck has pointed out, there are problems with citing paragraph numbers. With an HTML version, it would be quite possible to add an anchor to the start of every paragraph, so that a citation might simply provide a URL to the exact paragraph. E.g. Richardson. _Pamela_. Section IV, Letter VII, http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/pam1w10.htm#p456 (which unfortunately doesn't exist -- but follows Anne's example.) (One would expect that anyone citing a PG work would provide the link to the exact version that they'd used.) With a plain text version, it's simply not possible to give an exact citation, for the reasons that Michael mentioned. However, citation is about citing sources, as best one can, so that Richardson. _Pamela_. Section IV, Letter VII, http://www.gutenberg.org/dirs/etext04/pam1w10.txt would be perfectly acceptable as a citation -- leaving of course the matter of *finding* the exact point in the text to the reader. GIven that the reader can use the URL to obtain the text, and then use Find to search for the phrase in question, with less trouble that locating a phrase on a particular printed page, this seems to me to be a perfectly adequate form of citation. (Especially as any reader will be able to easily obtain the PG text, which can't be said for many print citations -- if you can't lay your hands on the print edition, it doesn't matter how closely the thing is cited! So my advice is -- don't sweat it, cite as best you can and consider the advantages over the disadvantages. Steve Gutenberg9443@aol.com wrote:

Since this topic came up, I have given it a lot of thought. I think I have the answer.

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?

Please discuss this WITHOUT FLAMING. The world has flames enough without them showing up here.

Anne

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