Page 416 - Green - Maritime Archaeology: A Technical Handbook. 2nd ed

Chapter 15: Reports and Publications 395
Criticism should always be used constructively; although critics may be quite severe, it is always best to use this criticism positively. Finally, it should be understood that many drafts may be required before the text is ready for publication. At times six or seven drafts may be produced. With prac- tice this number may be reduced to about three or four, but initially one must be prepared to do a lot of drafts. It is a rare person who can start up a computer and go into print in one go, and usually the more drafts the better and more polished the work becomes.
Figures and plates always tend to be a problem when working on drafts because they are difficult to incorporate into the text. Marginal notes and annotations can help where figures are required. With drawings or plans, it is best to try and incorporate them in the text so that the annotation can be referenced and checked properly. Microsoft Word is particularly good in this area, although as will be explained below it should not be used for type- setting. With some low-quality scans and graphic images put in the docu- ment the reader will be able to see the material that is being referred to, and this is a great advantage in the editorial stage.
The final report may have a somewhat uneven style, because some infor- mation or research may have proceeded much further in some areas than in others. This should not be a great concern provided the reasons are carefully explained and that eventually there is consistency. It may not be necessary to itemize every shard in the catalog, but it will be essential to provide information on the weights, numbers, etc., of the various groups of material. The object of the report is to provide information to others so that it will be possible to compare data and results and eventually build up a more comprehensive picture than would be possible from a single excava- tion report.
III. REFERENCING
Using references is fairly straightforward; you can either use the author–date system or footnotes. The author-date or Harvard system (used in this book) is favored by scientific journals, for example, the International Journal for Nautical Archaeology. Footnotes tend to be used by historically orientated journals. Publishers find footnotes difficult to typeset and usually recommend that authors keep them to an absolute minimum and use them as endnotes rather than footnotes. (Footnotes appear at the bottom of the page and can create enormous difficulties for typesetters, and endnotes ap- pear at the end of the publication and are much easier to deal with, al- though less accessible for the reader.) If the information is nonessential, it can be incorporated in footnotes, but in many cases it may be more ap- propriate to include it in the main body of text. Many modern word-