Quick Reference

The material I’ll be presenting today is available via links on my ambitiously named site “Student Writing Helps”. Two pages there have the links you’ll need for today:

• Turabian page
• Zotero page

My notes for the presentation are below for your reference as well, though some of this will only make sense to me.

Introduction

Learning Objectives:

By the end of this class, you should be able to:

1. Properly structure a formal research paper in Microsoft Word (or an open-source alternative);
2. Collect, organize, and accurately cite research sources using Zotero.

My background:

• Developed these workshops while a grad assistant at the BJU library
• Taught at FBC in Edmonton
• Now an editor at PAFC
• Also my undergrad degree included a minor concentration in the Department of Computer Science at BJU, so I have some theoretical background that helps with this kind of thing

My approach to teaching software skills:

We are discussing the skilled use of a tool, not the intricate nuances of a theological distinction. This is unlike most seminary training, which often involves summarizing a vast canon of received wisdom on a topic. You learn canonical wisdom (or “content” to use the over-deployed term of today’s web-based world) by comparatively passive absorption. You learn skills, on the other hand, by observing, experimenting, and even making mistakes.

The main thing you need to take away from this presentation is an understanding of the abstract concepts involved in the process, not the details of implementation. A lot of software education goes the wrong way here, in my opinion. Instead of teaching workflow and process, it descends into the banal demonstration of every single feature available via all the menus and keyboard shortcuts—95% of which you will never use. Don’t get side-tracked trying to write down every single click I make or every step in the process.

If you find that you have forgotten a step later when you’re trying to do this yourself, you can always consult support materials online. To that end, I am providing these notes and a page of support links for your future reference.

If you really get stuck, don’t hesitate to ask for help. It would be my pleasure to hear from you.

Using Turabian template files in Word

1. Read the manual!
   • Part 1 describes the research process
   • Part 2 describes technicalities of citations
   • Part 3 describes general issues of writing style
   • Appendix describes page layout issues, with examples
   • Using a chapter: chapter outline; section numbers
2. Turabian Template demo
   • Download templates from Writing Helps site
   • Create Cover Page and First Page
   • Styles are your friend! Important styles in the template include:
     • bodytext, t, text
     • quote, q
     • Headings (including invisible headers)
     • Footnotes (access by right clicking on a footnote and selecting “Style”)
     • bibliography, bib
   • Show automatic Table of Contents
   • Show Turabian Lorem Ipsum file

Zotero

Think of the last big paper you wrote. How many books and articles did you cite? How did you manage all of those references and articles?

By taking an hour or so to learn how to use citation management software now, you will improve the efficiency of your research and save hundreds of hours with the papers you’ll write in the future.

And the crucial payoff here is that you’ll eliminate much of the drudgery involved in creating standards-compliant citations. The onus remains on you to validate the accuracy of your citations, but much of the busy work of creating these can (and will be) handled by Zotero’s citation style engine.

Quick Demo

Let’s start with a quick demonstration. Consider this to be a preview. Just relax and watch for a couple minutes, then I’ll explain all the details.

Installing Zotero

Zotero includes four essential components, three of which you have to install:

1. Zotero
2. Zotero browser connector (available for Chrome, Firefox, Opera)
3. Word processor plugin (usually installs automatically with Zotero Standalone)
4. If you need a citation style format that isn’t included by default (like Turabian or SBL Handbook of Style), you have to add it to your Zotero Style Manager.

I won’t go through the process of installing Zotero from scratch. It is pretty easy.

For a lot of users, Zotero Sync provides a reliable way to both back up your research, and to access it on multiple devices. To set that up, you have to create an account on zotero.org. This is optional though, and I won’t demonstrate setting it up because it takes a long time for my personal library to sync to a new device for the first time. Later in the presentation I’ll switch to my personal Zotero library and you’ll see what I mean by this.

Find & save sources

• Library catalog (single items; multiple from list)
  • Bob Jones University Mack Library
  • WorldCat
• Amazon.com
• Google Books
• A blog post
• Regular web page
• Manually enter a random book off my desk

Organize your notes

• Fix errors (do this using the demonstration profile, then switch to my personal profile for the rest of the workshop)
• Collections & subcollections
• Tags
• Search & saved searches
• Notes

Cite your sources (use Lorem Ipsum file)

• Insert citations into the text.
• Create a bibliography.
• Move three citations.
• Refresh bibliography.
• Change style and refresh again.
• Remove Zotero codes and save document.

The sad story I have in mind is here on the Eerdmans website, and I also put a copy of it here on archive.org. The press release states that respected New Testament scholar Peter T. O’Brien seems to have committed unintentional (but significant) plagiarism in his recent commentary on Hebrews and also (though to a lesser degree) in his works on Ephesians and Philippians. As a result, Eerdmans is taking all three titles out of print and offering credit to those who own copies. The author himself freely admits his error and issues an unqualified apology in the statement.

I’d like to use this incident to speak to the issue of pastoral ethics. Since I am writing so soon after hearing this news, I do not pretend to have reached a settled conclusion on all of the questions involved. But the exercise is important, I think, painful though it be.

Perhaps the biggest question here is what we should now do with O’Brien’s books. My own gut reaction, and that of many friends I’ve asked who are in pastoral ministry, is that while we certainly wouldn’t want to cite O’Brien’s work for academic research, we could probably still use it to study the biblical text personally and for preaching. Last night, I printed a copy of the Eerdmans statement to stick in the front of each book (I actually own all three of the discontinued titles), and wondered if I could just leave it at that.

But I’m not sure doing so fully appreciates what is actually at stake. Significantly, the Eerdmans statement does not tell us what material in these works has been plagiarised from whom. Sean Winter goes as far as to suggest an example in this post, but as he also notes, the important question now is “what ought to happen to the various copies of these works that are still available to students in university and seminary libraries.”

I suspect that the results of the inquiry have been withheld at least partially because it is about the only thing Eerdmans can do to preserve something of O’Brien’s otherwise worthy reputation. (As an example of the respect with which O’Brien is held in the scholarly community, consider that he was honored with a Festschrift including contributions from heavyweights such as D. A. Carson, Moisés Silva, Graeme Goldsworthy, and others.) Of course, it’s not really our business anyway, but not knowing what came from where creates other problems for us.

Certainly the ideas in these commentaries can still help us to understand the biblical text as we produce an exegetical sermon. But knowing that the commentary contains plagiarism means that, effectively, we cannot properly attribute any statement in these works to the original source. In other words, as long as I know that there is an attribution problem with these commentaries, I simply can’t cite anything from them and consider that to be a proper acknowledgment of the original source. Verbally acknowledging O’Brien as the source of an idea or statement would undermine my credibility to those who know about the problems in these works.

An important, and frightening, thing here is that merely changing a few words while preserving the basic structure and argument of a quoted source is not enough to avoid plagiarism. If your idea is not original to you, then you are responsible to show where you got it, unless it is demonstrable that your idea is “common knowledge.” A couple helpful resources for understanding what is (and isn’t) plagiarism include Andy Naselli’s interview with Justin Taylor and this page on plagiarism.org. I will not repeat these ideas here any further because doing so isn’t necessary. Oddly, though the definition of plagiarism may formally be “common knowledge,” it is also commonly misunderstood.

It’s certainly true that citation standards are somewhat different (at least in form) for sermons than in standard academic writing. But I believe that faithful preachers should still give some form of credit where it is due, even if it’s somewhat indirect—i.e., while I might say “as one commentator has said,” I would most definitely cite it in my written manuscript with something like, “(O’Brien, Ephesians, 323).” Even here I am not the first person to suggest this. The form of the words in this paragraph are my own, but the idea probably comes from this post by Kerry McGonigal—I honestly don’t even know.

And as we know, plagiarism in sermons is another huge problem of its own. I have heard of preachers who may have re-used sermon outlines from others without attribution. In my own experience, I remember approximately where I was in the pew when a guest preacher’s message suddenly seemed unusually eloquent—and after Googling a few of the key words that I had just heard on my smartphone, it was obvious that this preacher had lifted (without verbal acknowledgment) four or five paragraphs from a well-known blog. (For this and other reasons, I’ve stopped bringing my phone to church most Sunday mornings.)

So what should a conscientious (but also busy) pastor do? Here are a few ideas:

• Even when sermon preparation time is limited, consult multiple sources to avoid depending too much on the insights of one author. You already know that, but I know the very real pressure that comes from the fact that “Sunday is always coming.”
• Use your own words as much as possible. If you can’t explain what your source says in your own words, you probably don’t understand the original idea that well anyway. (Although it’s true that often your source will express the idea better.)
• When quoting or using another’s idea, acknowledge your source in some form verbally and in your written notes. You simply can’t be too careful, as Justin Taylor has said.¹ These days, there are many tools available to make this easier.

Preachers of the Bible which commands that “you shall not steal” (Exod. 20:15 ESV) should be especially careful to properly acknowledge their sources. We stand on the shoulders of many others who have studied God’s word before us. May God help us all to faithfully do that, and forgive us for the words we may have stolen unawares.

Once I get the papers back, I’ve always become bogged down myself. Nobody ever taught me how to mark a paper, so I’ve tried all kinds of different approaches. Still, I usually wound up spending way too many hours on it, and of course, most of that time involved trying to show students why they can’t violate all the known conventions of English grammar and still be understood by readers. That’s not really helpful to anybody, actually.

Anyway, yesterday while I was in the middle of marking some papers, I thought I’d double-check to make sure that Turabian 8 was still the most recent edition of Turabian. On the University of Chicago Press website for Turabian, I found a PDF guide called “How to Teach Turabian” that includes a brief section called “A Quick Guide to Marking Student Papers.” It had never occurred to me that there would be guides on marking papers, and now I see that I’ve been doing this the wrong way for years.

Here are the guidelines for marking student papers:

1. Distinguish marking papers (a learning outcome) from grading papers (an evaluation outcome).
2. Let students help you decide when to mark their papers.
3. When you don’t respond, students can learn from their peers.
4. Don’t mark as you read.
5. In marking, less is more.
6. Have a learning agenda for your marks.
7. Mark papers “top-down.”
8. Don’t penalize good papers by leaving them unmarked.
9. The most effective marks focus on a reader’s response, not on the writer’s success or failure.
10. The most effective marks about writing have three parts: they (1) point out the specific issue on the page, (2) articulate the relevant general principle, and (3) suggest a change or, better, direct the student to make a change.
11. The most effective marks about argument—“content”—have three parts: they (1) point out the specific issue on the page, (2) explain what gives you pause, and (3) make a suggestion or, better, ask a question pointing the student in a new direction.

If you ever have to mark student writing, you should read the whole thing.