![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Vaguely on the subject of the last post:
I dunno how many of you out there have been in the habit of starting essays/papers with quotations. Myself, I picked it up from my high school mate Maggie Lee. Obviously, the paper in the last post quoted the Principia, which I think is a fairly 1337 reference; the one I'm looking at in Word currently quotes the Monty Python "Galaxy Song", which may be more or less 1337, depending on one's perspective. But what I'm curious about is... how many of you tend to follow the same practice, of putting a quotation at the beginnings of your "formal" works such as essays, etc.? And if so, can you give me any kind of history as to what/whom?
Aside from the Principia quote just mentioned, the one in question at the moment is:
"The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, the speed of light, you know--
Twelve million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is."
...tacked on to a paper about the Hubble constant and how we can infer the size of the universe from red-shift. (Astrophysics is teh r0x0r.)
I dunno how many of you out there have been in the habit of starting essays/papers with quotations. Myself, I picked it up from my high school mate Maggie Lee. Obviously, the paper in the last post quoted the Principia, which I think is a fairly 1337 reference; the one I'm looking at in Word currently quotes the Monty Python "Galaxy Song", which may be more or less 1337, depending on one's perspective. But what I'm curious about is... how many of you tend to follow the same practice, of putting a quotation at the beginnings of your "formal" works such as essays, etc.? And if so, can you give me any kind of history as to what/whom?
Aside from the Principia quote just mentioned, the one in question at the moment is:
"The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, the speed of light, you know--
Twelve million miles a minute and that's the fastest speed there is."
...tacked on to a paper about the Hubble constant and how we can infer the size of the universe from red-shift. (Astrophysics is teh r0x0r.)
no subject
Date: Jan. 17th, 2004 10:03 am (UTC)From:I've never done it, but I'm fully intending to when I write my ethnography. I'm going to use it to set the tone. It's like using a picture - how a picture is worth a thousand words. Well, in this case, maybe sticking a quote at the top of an essay is worth more words because of the tone they set and the implications they create.