A-ha moment

So I'm working on a chapter of my thesis and I discovered a big note to myself: FIX REFERENCE. I look it up and discover that I originally cited an online version of Horace's The Art of Poetry as a placeholder and needed to go back and cite the hard copy instead, meaning I'd have to correct the wording to match my edition.

Here is the passage that I cited:

Poems in the main (I'm speaking to a father and his excellent sons)
are baffled by the outer form of what's right. I strive to be brief,
and become obscure; I try for smoothness, and instantly lose
muscle and spirit; to aim at grandeur invites inflation;
excessive caution or fear of the wind induces grovelling.
The man who brings in marvels to vary a simple theme
is painting a dolphin among trees, a boar in the billows.
Avoiding a fault will lead to error if art is missing.

-Horace, Ars Poetica, in The Satires of Horace and Perseus, trans. by Niall Rudd (London: Penguin Classics, 2005), ll. 24-31, p. 122.

Why do I find this blog-worthy? Because I think it's good advice for how I should approach my thesis. Sometimes I try too hard to meet certain style requirements (length, not citing too much, etc.) and I lose out on actually making a decent point. Style for style's sake doesn't work. It's important, but you also need an argument.

I *knew* I was reading this stuff for a reason!