Endnotes, again

Read this on the RSS feed though, and yeah, I hate endnotes and hate reading books with endnotes. I like footnotes for explanatory stuff and Harvard-style references. Clear and easy to use.

Substantively, I’ve seen some books use the equivalent of sidebars to display expository notes or background information. You have to think pretty carefully about what information goes in those boxes to make the presentation work, but it’s an option worth considering.

For my book – which includes sizeable chunks of translated text – I used Harvard referencing, chapter endnotes for the original text quoted (for anyone who wanted to check my translation), & footnotes for explanatory notes. Then the publisher said they didn’t like footnotes, so I absorbed all those notes into the main text. This meant I couldn’t get as De Selbyesque as I would have liked, but that’s probably all to the good.

Endnotes bad. Harvard good. Online hypertext excellent (though I wouldn’t remove refs from the physical book).

Is there any particular reason you can’t just use Harvard?

It has been my experience that the publisher not the writer dictates what form the citations will take. Generally, they prefer endnotes to footnotes. I just finished proofing an academic journal article which required endnotes and it was quite a pain flipping back and forth to verify them. My guess is that like Phil states that there is a good chance the publisher will force you to use endnotes rather than footnotes. I have written one non-academic book and for that I went with a modified version of option three. I had a single “furhter reading section” at the end of the book. Not having to write endnotes made it a much much easier book to write than my first two.

I don’t mind endnotes, but please please please avoid the stupid stupid stupid practice of having the chapter title at the top of each page of the main text, and the endnotes marked by chapter number. I am sick of looking back through the pages, one finger keeping my current position and another keeping my place in the endnotes, looking for the chapter number of the chapter I’m reading. I can’t understand why any publisher would do this, but it’s not uncommon. And it’s really stupid.

Tom – agreed. A running head of “References for pages nnn-nnn” is ideal, but sadly rare.

Footnotes. Chicago style or sim. Love them. There is no substitute. I find endnotes annoying, especially as there is no good reason for them now that typesetting is done on computers. I hate in-body parenthetical references, because I find them distracting. Text is text, references and notes should be separate, but easily accessible, i.e., at the bottom of the damned page!

Not surprisingly (since I’m a historian) I agree with Another Damned Medievalist. I find in-text citations clunky and distracting. In history, they’re impossible, since it’s hard to cite archival material in text. Endnotes are a pain, as everyone here has already noted–and I wish to echo the people who object to footnotes with any header other than “notes for pages xxx-yyy.”

A side benefit to footnotes is that it will discourage you from having too many discursive notes, which are really not very good practice. I’ve always felt that the material should either be in the main text–because it’s important–or not be there at all. Which is not to say that my work doesn’t often have such notes, only that I recognize they’re indulgent and a bad idea. I’m currently reading a book with end notes, and nearly every one has a paragraph worth of extraneous material. I’m constantly flipping back and forth and spending a fair amount of time in the endnotes. It’s like reading a David Foster Wallace novel! It takes discipline as an author, but things that aren’t relevant enough to be in the main text really ought just to be cut.

Footnotes for explanatory stuff, Harvard-style references. I hate endnotes.

notes: in footnotes. If really long: 1. are you sure it isn’t a section in the text? 2. inset box, even if it takes up the whole page. Notes are really part of the text for careful reading. In an online version something like an inline drop down would be appropriate.

citations: if not there you are clearly writing a novel or self-help drivel. I like the superscript numbers, particularly if there are a lot. Citations are a list each of which will be used separately to do the look up and therefore not in the text flow.

I second Another Damned Medievalist. To me, the classic sin of academic writing is putting long cites in the test. It breaks the flow of reading every other minute.

It’s like listening to somebody try to tell a story, when they keep interrupting themselves every other sentence.

I’m in the pro-footnotes, anti in-line citations group for print, because of disciplinary boundaries/habits. So it depends on the disciplines you most want to address, I guess.

BUT: for all etext I support endnotes or, much better, links/tooltip hovers, partly as a matter of style and legibility, but mostly because (machine-readable) etext can be accessible to sight-impaired readers, who can listen to it. Unless you have a really smart reader, and format for it, footnotes are the worst violence you can do to a text for listeners: breaking flow, adding number strings the readers can’t parse etc. In-line citations do this too, especially if you’re in the habit of bunching them up together.

Re avoiding discursive footnotes as bad writing discipline, I think it depends what sort of book you’re writing: Goitein’s A Mediterranean Society simply would lose much of its charm and value treated this way, because it surveys a field of resources, Marx’s Kapital or Geertz’s Negara, being all argument, require nothing but references. For casual/popular reading, I really like books that aren’t afraid of an interesting digression or titbit and for this I love sidebars, but that implies something else about the kind of book you’re writing.

…a corollary to my previous comment: as a general question, do you think people should be able to interact with/receive your text however they want, or do you think it is part of the author’s rights/responsibility to prescribe how their text should be used?
Obviously there are outlying cases – art texts, poetry – where one or the other of these options may be part of the point of the presentation, but what about academic texts in general: do you abhor people listening because they should be reading, or selecting short sections, etc?

Richard@25 pretty well covers my view, I think. I tend to feel that anything that requires a substantial explanation ought to be in the body of the text anyway, though – for me it’s a sign that the flow of the material isn’t what I the writer thought it was going to be, and my responsibility to adjust. And yes, in any event, each citation should stand on its own with enough information to get from it to the original.

I agree with richard about endnotes for e-text. If you’re thinking about the future, reading a book on a Kindle or other e-book device makes endnotes very easy to use.

Re internet extras – I think these should indeed be extras. Internet access is inconvenient and for some unaffordable or otherwise impracticable – and anyway, a book should be self-contained.

It may not be quite to the point inasmuch as we’re are talking about references, which to be useful would normally need to be tracked down, but the gist of the position is that I want to be able to sit on the beach with my book (and possibly a pencil stub and some post-its) and read everything the author wanted to tell me.

I suppose the question remains of what would constitute dispensable extras – perhaps a ‘writing of’ feature? Deleted chapters? Actually the latter I suppose might not be far off.

This is much better than the all-footnotes system used, for example, in legal writing.

Not that this matters much, but that system is used almost exclusively in academic legal writing. In the real world, lawyers mostly use inline citation.

In the interest of making your book accessible to the renaissance thinkers some centuries after the inevitable apocalypse, or to those on the other side of today’s digital divide, you shouldn’t rely on an internet-based hypertext version to handle all your references. If you have a lot of detailed explanation that is worthwhile enough to put in the book but not in the main narrative, I really like the idea of an end-of-chapter further reading section. But really, it comes down to how relevant and important are those explanations? I think the spectrum of importance goes:

Work the idea into the main narrative -> footnotes -> end-of-chapter -> end-of-book -> cut them.

So how important are these explanations to you and potential readers?

Remember Barthes’s method in Camera Lucida.

Complete footnotes are the bread and butter of scholarship, be they references or discursive. If you intend to write your book for serious scholars, then you have no option but to use footnotes. If you’re audience is not serious scholars, then scholarly standards can most certainly slide.

In-text textual citations are inelegant and mess up the flow of the prose. The only problem with legal citations is that they use silly mechanisms like “Supra note 156 at 22,” which forces the reader to go back twenty-nine pages to find note 156. This is why Chicago is superior: “Last Name, Short Title, page” for subsequent references and a bare full citation on first mention.

The only exception to in-text citation – which shouldn’t be a problem for you – is in commentaries on texts. In this case it is appropriate to use in-text citations. For instance (TII, §4) to refer to something John Locke’s Second Treatise of Government section four.

“Last Name, Short Title, page” for subsequent references and a bare full citation on first mention.
That’s great as long as there’s a bibliography at the end. Where there’s no bib I generally find myself grinding my teeth and noticing how many citations there are to only a few sources.

For printed works, I’m a fan of the method ajay describes in #9. For HTML, there’s a really elegant Javascript/CSS version at the blog Brand Spanking New. I stole their code for a slightly simplified version, described at Mekong.net.

One of the things I like about the BSN script is that it allows you to insert the source right next to the relevant text. For me, that makes it easier to avoid mixing up references.

So what’s such a bad idea about “indulgent”? A happy writer makes a happy reader, I say.

Me, I like end notes, the more digressive the better. I save them up and read them all together at the end of a chapter. It’s like discussing the same topic with two different people (sometimes surprisingly different people) in the same day. The compare and contrast makes the trip more interesting.

FWIW: In printed works I like footnotes. Especially if you add in some that are not just references but also cover interesting points that are secondary to the main text.

Eszter @51: I hate footnotes for references when mixed with substantive commentary

Obvously I’m not challenging this account of personal experience and preference, but isn’t it usually clear when a footnote is a reference? It’s generally attached to some mention of an author or a work, or to a quote.

I’ve never had any trouble of the kind described at all, but then maybe I’ve adapted to deal with it – in philosophy, refs are almost never in the text, and in any case most footnotes are references (sometimes with additional remarks). That’s my impression anyway – I haven’t tried to check it. Having said that, one of the most readable (if misguided and misused) philosophy books – Anarchy State and Utopia – has a beguiling combination of asterisked, obelisked and numbered notes, asides in parenthesis and even italicised digressions spanning several pages.

On another topic, the point made in previous comments about the popular aversion to annotations is certainly worth considering, though I wouldn’t be surprised if it were a conventional myth, perhaps born of snobbery, of the kind familiar enough in periodical publishing.

As the widespread inability even to make endnotes easy to find suggests, the orthodox opinions of publishers on how to organise books isn’t necessarily to be taken very seriously. Just how many people, I wonder, have decided against purchasing, reading or recommending a book solely because it had footnotes? And what evidence do publishers have about the matter? I can’t believe it’s that much of a problem.

I’m with Tom Wilkinson on publishers’ reluctance to publish books with footnotes. I asked a fairly prominent editor about just this question – is there evidence for the idea that the general public doesn’t buy books with footnotes? His response was basically, “They just don’t like books with footnotes.” So, no, it doesn’t seem as if publishers actually have any evidence for the idea that the general reading public runs away screaming at the sight of some little text at the bottom of the page.

My suspicion is that readers who are scared by footnotes wouldn’t be that interested in the sort of book that would have footnotes in the first place. What’s really inexcusable are books whose audience is obviously limited to scholars that have endnotes.

yeah, sorry, that came across as faintly critical – and it wasn’t particularly well-thought, as I recognised just after clicking ‘submit’.

For mine own part, with footnotes I’m pretty sure I tend to glance down (or maybe even use peripheral vision) and check that it’s just a reference without interrupting the flow much – though that only works when there aren’t more than one (or maybe two) footnotes on the page.

It certainly wouldn’t work with endnotes of course – so as between the two types of note, it counts in favour of the foot variety I suppose.