I little help about referencing and footnotes please..

Ok so I've done my A2 OCR independent investigation but I've been told by my tutor we need to do footnotes at the bottom of each page. He didn't tell us this before he said the bibliography was enough, so I'm having to go back and remember which books I used for which pages of my essay.

However he also came out with another thing which was in the footnotes we have to put down exactly which page of the book we used we got that information from. Problem is since I didn't know this at the time of writing I didn't write a big list of what quote came from what page etc. The essay is due in tomorrow really or next week at the latest, problem is I can't get my hands on about three of the books I used again now...

I didn't quote word for word from the book, as in "X states 55% of plague suffers died within two days" I wrote some note form stuff. So in one paragraph I add his overall view on the subject to support another historian which I wrote more about, so I wrote:

"Twigg, who wrote about similar issues with the fleas ability to survive in Europe’s climate in his book Black Death: A Biological Reappraisal, has examined the symptoms of the disease and the biology of the fleas and rats common in Europe at the time. He comes to the conclusion that anthrax, caused by the bacterium Bacillus anthracis, fits the symptoms and rate of spread of the plague better then bubonic plague caused by Y.Pestis."

So basically that's his key view, i probably read a few pages and got that, but as I said I didn't write down exactly what pages I looked at. Will I get penalised if I only put this in the footnotes for that page?

The Black Death: A Biological Reappraisal, Graham Twigg (his book)

I don't want my essay rejected or something :frown:

Reply 1

superginge7

hiya dude im on AQA but by the sounds of it ya teacher is bein overly picky! we dont need any page numbers on ours, definately, but ya might wana check on the OCR website!

i think his point is more that the examiner might POSSIBLY get abit pissed off if he needs 2 check the quotation an cant find the page, which wouldnt neccessarily make ya lose marks but who wants a pissed off examiner markin their work ay? haha. i think u would b fine tho coz u sed u avnt rli got quotations. id say ur definately fine actually, youre teacher sounds like a bit of a douche!

but ye, if all else fails, go on google books. just type google books into google an if u do have a quotation, type that bad boy into the search thingy an the book will come up, conveniently on the right page too! if the book isnt in the system just try typin it into google with quotation marks round it, coz there are loadsa other things with books online.