by Bill Wilt

Created on: September 13, 2007

One of my most peevish pets always scratches me when I don't cite newspapers by page and column, and when I don't put the page number of a quote from a book.

I vaguely remember from law school that there was a Chicago Stylebook (at least for legal cites), which went into a good bit of detail-which, of course, had to be followed in papers we submitted in our advanced (2nd and 3rd year) classes.

Not that I was a renal retentive, of course, but, in the days of typewriters, I wrote all my papers on a continuous roll of shelf-paper, cut down to 8.5 inches wide. I included all footnotes right in the text, and when I got through writing, I'd take a ruler, measure down about 8.5 or 9 inches (1 inch margin top and bottom) and tear the roll of type into page-length chunks.

When I typed out the pages, I used a pica typewriter, or 10-pitch for the text, "typing over" the footnote(s). Then I'd take the page out of the 10-pitch and run it into the elite (12-pitch) typewriter, and type the footnotes. Of course I edited a bit more as I typed, but i didn't have much leeway, as I wanted to keep pretty much to the page-lengths that I'd cut.

The end result was a paper that looked great and read easily-having footnotes at the foot of a page is a boon to the reader, I've always felt.

And I cannot, for the life of me, figure out why publishers these days stuff the notes at the back of the book. The book-publishing software can handle the footnotes darned near automatically, even run-on notes that have to be broken over two pages. So, IMHO, there's no excuse for NOT having the footnotes at the foot of the page.

i find that I have to keep a bookmark in the back of the book for the notes relevant to the particular chapter, or, in some cases, the page, and flip back and forth between the "reading pages" and the notes.

If publishers think that footnotes "distract the reader," I'm here to say that the notes in the back infuriate the reader. Particularly when the author embellishes an idea that, launched in the text, enhances the point being made in the text.

Should any of you share this opinion about footnotes, I suggest letting the publisher or publishing house know your preference.

Indices:

While I'm at it, I find that, the more complete or comprehensive an index, the more helpful it is to the reader. Current publishing software makes indexing (and tables of contents) relatively easy to handle, but an index which is "skimpy" is almost worse than no index at all.

Before the advent of feature-fattened

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