Re: Footnotes/End notes formatting

["andy turnbull" andyt@xxxxxxxx]

My pet hate is the end-notes that are listed chapter by chapter, especially
when the chapters have numbers rather than names.
If you want to check something you first have to page back to find out what
chapter you're in, then forward to the end notes. Then, if the end-notes for
one chapter take more than a page, you might have to page back and forth
through the end-notes to get the one you want.
I use footnotes in my books (some of them are on line at
www.andyturnbull.com) and I number them sequentially -- from start to
finish. That's an advantage because you just have to remember one number
(as, eg, footnote 259) rather than footnote 6 in chapter 12, or whatever.

andy t
----- Original Message -----
From: "Michael Norman" 
To: ; 
Sent: Wednesday, January 09, 2008 9:15 PM
Subject: Re: Footnotes/End notes formatting
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



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