Dear SBL and Hendrickson- colons are stupid
In the midst of my dissertation writing I have to be diligent about proper formatting. I happen to be a bit of an expert when it comes to bibliography managers too, which I use to manage my footnotes and bibliography.
One thing that really annoys me about the SBL style is its use of the colon in footnotes directly before the cited page only for journal articles and book reviews! Every other type (books, essays, etc) use a comma before the cited page. So why? Who knows, but it is really annoying.
Worse than that, and the reason it should be changed, is that the lack of uniformity introduces difficulty for bibliographic software to do its job. Bib. software wants a uniform way to work with cited pages.
So, if SBL ever decides to do a new edition of the SBL Handbook, please kill the colon! (and follow the advice for electronic editions of books I've given too)
Labels: SBL
posted by Danny Zacharias at
8:38 AM
1 Comments:
I used to puzzle about the colons too, until the rationale was explained to me. We are used to seeing a colon between a volume number and a page number, as in TDNT 5:83. Well, each issue of a journal has a volume number, and each article has a set of pages. So, for example, we could expect CBQ 72:84-100. The year is inserted in parentheses as an aid to quickly find the particular issue, but the colon after the year belongs with the volume number. So there is a reason.
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