Re: Footnotes/End notes formatting

[Michael Norman michael.norman@xxxxxxxx]

At 02:26 PM 1/9/2008, Patricia M. Godfrey wrote:
House wants "citation" endnotes as they call them. To wit:
p. 222 ,And what a night it was...,: Miller, Adventures
of The Mayflower Madame, 234.
Besides the extra work it takes to create this format, what is the
purpose? I recently read a book with that type of note, and I found
it quite annoying. Author-date citation, in the scientific and
social-scientific manner, I can see. Or traditional numbered notes.
But what end does this serve?
It serves the opinion of commercial publishers who are trying to make
their non-fiction books more reader-friendly, publishers who feel
that general readers -- rather than specialized readers, which is to
say, scholars -- are annoyed by those little numbers that keep
popping up at the end of sentences, interrupting the flow of the
discourse. I have no idea what readers like and don't like in that
regard. At this point, I'm concerned only with thoroughly documenting
our sources for the reader. I think we can do that and make the
publisher happy at the same time. I agree with you; I like the
superscript numbers in the text. But, then, I've spent a career
trading in such texts. The real issue in the business -- again,
commercial non-fiction -- is not the form of the footnote; it's the
footnotes themselves and the sloppy way so many of these stories are
documented. Writers are forever taking shortcuts with their
documentation, for all the old and obvious reasons. I enjoy reading
footnotes, tracking the provenance of the material, the ideas. And
I'm guessing I have a lot of company on this list.
Michael Norman