The end for endnotes?

Perhaps Cerulo decided that putting that little factoid in the main text would disrupt its argument flow or something.

I’m not sure what your point is: that in fact the cult was optimistic, rather than pessimistic?

Or that they were on the “lunatic fringe,” but not for the reasons ascribed at the time?

When end notes convey interesting information that is only peripherally relevant to the argument in the main text, or cite figures, then I find them interesting. They can also be used to refer to one’s own arguments in another paper that support or parallel the arguments being made.
All in all, I prefer the citations to be made in the text, with end notes and footnotes reserved for the above kinds of information.
Nevertheless, Heaven’s Gate certainly belongs in the end notes. Sorry.

The only good thing to be said for endnotes is that at least you can find the bloody things because they are in a predictable place at the back end of the book. Publishers and authors who really hate their readers will place them at the end of each chapter, collected together. I have no idea who might find this helpful, apart from teaching professors who are photocopying a chapter to distribute to their students, which is not behaviour that I would have thought the copyright holders would want to facilitate.

Footnotes offer an ideal opportunity for snarkiness however, as exemplified by Gibbon, where half of the joy in reading it, and why people should really make the time to read an unabridged edition, comes in the footnotes.

Jeez. I don’t think “ibid” is that big a deal. I mean, once I realize there are endnotes in the first place, I look to see how many of them are citations, and how many of them contain relevant information. Then, I write down the numbers of the ones that contain relevant information. Then, whenever I see an endnote, I consult that piece of paper. Then, I kill myself and my family.

Ever read “A Garland of Ibids for Van Wyck Brooks”, by Frank Sullivan?

I’d long assumed that the reason for endnotes was that it was easier for formatting when people used typewriters and hand-set type and the like. But, now that computers take care of all that I don’t see why anyone uses endnotes. The exception might be in legal writing, where the notes are often nearly as long, and sometimes longer, than the substance and yet almost never have substance themselves. (I wish that practice would end, but this doesn’t seem likely.)

I think you just want books to be hypertext.

Have you ever written a book, marketed to a general readership, that was based heavily on research? The end-note format is simply the best way to attribute the material, without detracting from the narrative flow.

I recently co-authored a book, Donkey Cons: Sex, Crime, and Corruption in the Democratic Party, that had more than 600 end-notes. To have cited the sources at the bottom of each page — “footnotes,” a technical distinction that Al Franken insisted on hammering Ann Coulter about — would have been extremely cumbersome and distracting, especially on those occasions when there were 6 notes on one page, or when a note contained explanatory material.

Some uses of endnoting are better than others, but a bad example does not indict the whole concept of endnotes. Secondary material must be sourced and attributed somehow, and the endnote format has proven popular.

I assume that in most serious books there is a place for supporting material outside the main text. The question, then, is where, exactly, that place is.

The value of endnotes is that they allow the author to maintain scholarly rigor and sourcing standards without distracting the lay reader with extraneous material on the page or at the end of the chapter. (I suspect that many general readers will simply not purchase a book with visible notes among the text.) It makes it possible to publish serious non-fiction to the general audience but also maintain standards required in the scholarly community. And I think this is an excellent result. The same goes for the increasing practice of locating endnotes by reference to the text, without putting superscript note numbers in the text itself. (I.e., each note is preceded by page numbers and/or quotations from the text, so the reader can easily locate the notes for a particular point that catches their attention in the text, or the text for a point that they read in the notes – but uninterested readers can simply read straight through without any distractions.)

Making the notes essentially invisible to the uninterested reader, while still including them for scholars and others interested, is a great compromise. Given the crap-awful level of public discourse on serious subjects these days, anything that upholds standards of factuality while addressing the general public should be applauded.

I second abb1’s view: with books that contain them (including DFW’s doorstopper), I almost always read two things first: the endnotes and the bibliography. If they captivate, then I’ll read the book.

A readerly argument for footnotes (suggested by Parfit’s remark on R&P) is that most books really worth reading aren’t really “read” until you’ve gone through multiple passes (a shorter version of this phenomenon is–quite movingly–found in Andre Dubus’ essay, ‘A Hemingway Story’). As such, I like to first orient myself to the author’s overall mental world by checking out endnotes/bibliography, then do a quick read that ignores footnotes/endnotes to get a sense of where the author is going within that world, and only on a kind of third reading do I get to the author’s equivocations/elaborations in the endnotes. I prefer endnotes over footnotes for precisely the reason that it’s easier to avoid getting tripped up early over some point whose charitable interpretation/role in overall argument may not yet be available to me.

I used to love FOOTnotes and am always aggravated up the wazoo when publishers put substantive comments into ENDnotes instead of FOOTnotes.

Conventional wisdom in publishing is that footnotes scare away readers, but I say that readers who are afraid of FOOTnotes are not about to look something up in an ENDnote, so as a rule of thumb if the author wants something read it had better be in the text (in parentheses, perhaps).

Footnotes were phased out when publishers got away from galley proofs that were pasted up in pages after first proofreading. If you page the book in Quark and make changes that cause text to shift from one page to another, it messes up the footnotes. A book with a lot of notes may have to be repaged after every proofreading. Hence, endnotes.

I don’t mind endnotes that are citing sources of information. (You want authors to not cite sources of information?) But I agree that comments should either be in the text or in FOOTnotes.

For an invesigation of footnotes both informative and funny as all get out Anthony Grafton “The Footnote from De Thou to Ranke” in _History and Theory_ 33/4 53-76.

“Like the toilet,” Grafton argues, “the footnote enables one to deal with ugly tasks in private; like the toilet it is tucked genteely away – often, in recent years, not even at the bottom of the page but at the end of the book. Out of sight, and even out of mind, seems exactly where so banal a device belongs.”

He concludes:

“In a brilliant passage, Gibbon dissects the five volumes of the Origines Guelficae: ‘The hands of several workmen are apparent; the bold and original spirt of Leibnitz, the crude erudition and hasty conjectures of Eccard, the useful annotations of Gruber, and the crtical disquisitions of Scheid.’ [footnote 54] One could say much the same – if one could write such sentences – of the footnote. A palimpsest, it reveal on examination reserach techniques framed in the Renaissance, critical rules first stated during the Scientific Revolution, the irony of Gibbon, and the empathy of Ranke.”

I loves me a footnote and hates me an endnote, for reasons articulated by others.

For that matter, look at your own example. You looked at the endnotes to check the dates on the cited media reports. You didn’t need to go to the source material for this to be worthwhile; the endnotes contained the material you needed.

I agree with Matt. A banal comment, I full well know, but a separate website sounds like a needlessly cumbersome approach.

This may be a corollary to #26, but footnotes take up more space than endnotes do. In other words, the same book is longer if it has footnotes rather than endnotes. You can see this yourself in a large file in MS Word. Look at the page-length in footnotes, then have Word convert the footnotes to endnotes. The number of pages will shrink. A shorter book is cheaper to print for academic presses.