Hoom, hoom!: Let us not be hasty

EndNote and End Times: the death-cult of modern management.

All right, my title combines a tag-line from Tolkien’s Treebeard the Ent with a poor eschatological pun, but then we all have those days when we find ourselves muttering ‘I have lived too long’ or ‘It’s not the end of the world, but you can see it from here’. Treebeard gives voice to Tolkien’s misgivings about the haste and impatience that he saw driving modern industrial culture’s more destructive lurches, of which EndNote, to my mind, is a small instance. Let me explain. EndNote is a citation and documentation program used widely in the academic world, and for good reason. With EndNote, a researcher needs only once to enter the bibliographical details of any text she wishes to cite; thereafter she can quote, paraphrase or cite it as often as she likes, and each time EndNote will magic up an appropriately formatted footnote, endnote or in-text citation automatically. Academics of a certain age will remember the drudgery of scribbling passages and comments onto stacks of note cards, transcribing these into our typescripts and keeping track of all the fiddly details of whatever citation format they were using, whose arcana could out-fuddle those of hard-ball kabbalistic commentary. The oldest among us will still shudder at the memory of doing all this on typewriters, with something of Dickens’ queasy recall of his bottle-blacking days in the workhouse. If you composed your article on the metaphysics of fork-imagery in Dryden’s ‘Absolom and Achitophel’ using MLA citation format, but you later wanted to submit it to a journal that insisted on Harvard format, there was nothing for it but to retype the whole thing. EndNote can do the job for you with a couple of keystrokes; even better, it can convert your notes from just about any known citation format to any other just as easily.