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Some of this material is of a kind that it should be sourced, in my opinion. The bottom line is that you do it one way or another, but you don't even necessarily need footnotes or a bibliography. Just phrases like "According to....." might do, or a statement of your sources before you launch into the paraphrasing. To a reader like myself, that this is not in here is a nagging distraction. Sourcing is just a part of good writing, so the fact that this is a Substack doesn't make it unnecssary. I have no doubt of your integrity, but we want our Substacks to be well-written, and it's really an easier part of writing well than some of the more creative parts. The piece will come across stronger if you source.

In case the types of passages that I'm thinking of are not obvious, an example is the three consecutive paragraphs beginning "A three sport star in high school....", "Boomer will admit to you now....", Being a young man with a big ego...." I have no idea what you read to come to this information and these opinions, or if you interviewed him.

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You know David, I hadn't received a single word of criticism on this website until yesterday, and now I've received two poignant bits in the last two days. I guess it shows that I'm beginning to grow and people are beginning to care.

In all honesty, it just comes down to me being very new to this non-fiction writing thing. I used to only speak about football games, which required no source other than rbsdm.com. I only began writing in a style that would require the citing of any source with the Trent Green stuff in July, and quite I've had very little exposure to the non-fiction writing world. The four months since the beginning of July have felt like forever (at least to me), but I must admit to still being very inexperienced at this. As you can probably tell by the way I write things, almost all my writing experience comes from the world of either literature or literature analysis, neither of which require any citation (aside from the one work I'm analysing).

All of that is to say yes. I'll work on it. It's not a natural skill for an analyst to cite a source, and because I'm not being paid for any of this (and not charging anybody to read it) I don't technically HAVE to cite anything, so I honestly never thought about it until now. After all, who would think to fact check something like this? That's what I thought at the time anyways, and on a platform like Substack, this is not an academic journal. It's not my job here to make it as easy as possible for you to fact check me like it would be in an academic context.

You make a very good point though. While I feel no legal or moral imperative to source anything, it's a writing etiquette thing, and one I'm failing at pretty badly. Now that I have something of an audience, I ought to begin worrying about things like this. I'm not going to retrofit anything (the reward to effort ratio is not high enough), but going forward I will work on it.

Thanks for caring enough to criticize David. I'm happy I can elicit any reaction at all!

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