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Rick's is a point that I have been making for a number of years with the help of a Peanuts cartoon (which is inadequately referenced, alas, having been hastily photocopied from a yellowing copy of the Brandon Sun -- so that means it's at least a dozen years old --) Marcie is speaking to her academically challenged classmate: "That's a good paper, sir, but you didn't use any footnotes." Sir: "Why would I need footnotes, Marcie?" Marcie: "You use a footnote when you give the source of facts that are not common knowledge." Sir: "Then I'm okay... I don't know anything that's not common knowledge." Despite what Russ says, I find my students generally quite quick to pick up the notion that "common" varies from context to context, and we get some quite interesting discussions of rhetorical problems such as "do I have to footnote what my professor says in class or is it common knowledge in the class?" The rest is practice, and just as it has taken most of us years to refine and define our own practices of acknowledgement, I expect that my students will also have to keep working at it. My "telling" them obviously won't bring them to my own level of referential sophistication ;) but it will get them started on the process. And once again I won't apologize for the artificiality of the telling. Cheers, Susan Drain [log in to unmask]