Kat, can you shed any light on why my administrative law textbook sends me into paroxysms of rage? (Other than content, that is.) The body of the text is written in some fairly standard serif font, like Times New Roman or something, but whenever they quote - usually very lengthy - extracts from other works or from case judgments, they use a really basic sans serif font with very thin rounded letters, and it drives me mad. I actually hardly ever bother to read those bits, which is really not good.
On the plagiarism thing, I'm intrigued. I think it must be to do with your approach to what you're doing. Here, the exams and essays are simply to test your understanding and retention of the material. We're not meant to be writing a new and ground-breaking article, we're meant to be demonstrating that we know what we're talking about and have thought about it. Obviously for dissertations we have to cite anything we reference, but do you seriously have to put the publisher, date, etc. every time you reference anything anyone else has ever said? For instance, if you say "Legal commentators such as TRS Allan believe that Parliament is not sovereign" you would have to find a reference for a published work which proves that TRS Allan believes that?
I can totally see why you're not allowed to write "I have come up with this new and clever argument all on my own and it's definitely not just lifted from a textbook by Gray and Gray hoooo no of course not", but I don't quite understand how you can have a bibliography for an essay that is mostly referencing cases (which the examiner will know backwards, being experts in the field) and occasionally the general views of an academic.