Fun (Not)

Went to the mandatory training session for one of the journals I signed up for in the frenzies of last week. About 30-40 people attended, several from my section. The session featured ice cream sundaes. After everyone got the sundaes, it all went down hill from there. We were each handed a thick packet of instructions, and one of the editors went over specifically what "subciting" really means.

I had thought that "subciting" just meant checking to see whether a footnote is written in the correct format. Boy was I wrong.

Apparently, authors are very sloppy when it comes to footnotes. Some write them in the wrong format. Those would be the least of your problems. (Although, whether something should be classified as a press release or an Internet article is apparently really important.)

For those technical problems, we use the Blue Book, which is this thick book with nothing but arbitrary rules of how to cite cases, books, law journal articles, internet websites, television shows, you name it. It covers everything in excruciating minutae, from typeface to spacing, down to whether a comma or a period should be italicized. I'm not kidding.

Fun fun fun.

What surprised me, however, is that apparently, while subciting, we are expected to look at the entire footnote critically and decide whether it is appropriate as well as correct. When the author cites a case, for example, we are supposed to make sure the case is still current and hasn't been overruled. When the author summarizes a journal article, we are supposed to make sure he is correct about the main point of the article. When the author cites an entire article rather than lines from the article, we are supposed to make sure a "pinpoint citation" is not more appropriate.

When an author says "see Blah Blah Blah", we are supposed to make sure he doesn't mean "See also Blah Blah Blah" or "Cf Blah Blah Blah", which apparently has slightly different shades of meaning and therefore requires you to both understand HIS point and the point of the Blah Blah Blah he is citing.

Sometimes an author is mistaken about the relevance of a source to his central point. Sometimes authors exaggerates the level of support a source lends to his argument. Sometimes it's clear that an author has never read the source at all and just did a Google keyword search and listed whatever he found there. So apparently it's our job to read the source and then decide whether it should be used the way the author used it in his article.

This sucks when the source itself is a book.

For every citation, we are supposed to fill out an entire form, and address each of these concerns separately. This means that subciting is about 100 times more involved and time-consuming than I thought it was.

All this, when we haven't even gone through citations in our Legal Writing classes yet.

Time to rethink working for a journal? :(