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Reading James Brown, Kenna Mannos, and Pat Sadowy's piece in Inkshed
13.2 makes me want to say/write this.  The confusion students report
(p. 11) about what to reference has only a rhetorical solution.  That
is, one doesn't have to reference common knowledge (or even
noncontroversial knowledge).  But whose common knowledge are we
talking about (obviously not the student writer's).  What needs to be
referenced for one readership does not need to be referenced for
another.  In short, it is the common knowledge of the addressed
readers/discourse community that must be estimated in order to know
what to reference.  Likewise, what those readers/community will
perceive as controversial/debatable must be referenced.  Of course,
students often don't have much sense of the discourse community they
are nominally addressing in academic papers, so they will have
difficulty deciding what needs to be referenced.  But we can, at
least, make sure they understand the rhetorical nature of the problem
so that, as they read and research, they can try to get a sense of
what the particular discourse community considers common knowledge.

The preceding, of course, becomes particularly important once
students learn that more than direct quotations requires referencing.