Irritating though they can be, I much prefer footnotes to the alternatives.
I'm reading a book 1 that puts all the notes between the last chapter and the index.
If I want to read a note I must therefore start by turning back, page by page, until I find the beginning of the chapter to find the chapter number, then turn to the end of the book and browse through the notes until I find the heading for the relevant chapter, all the time having to keep my place in the text, and only then, at the third stage, can I read the note I want.
Are such notes meant to be read, or are they just a pretence at scholarship?
1Graham Farmelo The Strangest Man about Paul Dirac, an excellent book, apart from the notes.
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I've never understood the problem some people claim to have with footnotes either. I suspect it may have arisen as an echo of the problems that *printers* may have had with them, and then taken on a life of its own.
Whereas the foot of the page seems to me a rather natural place to put short notes (the eye can flip there and back without much trouble, and you can always ignore them if you want to), the problem comes when the footnote expands to fill more than a single page. You're then reduced to either alloting a maximum "horizon" above which footnotes cannot go, which means they might be spread over several pages, thereby displacing any footnotes that originated on those pages, or you break up the main text with a full page, or even more, of footnote. I suspect that's how end-notes originated. If there's that much extra text floating around though, one's better of writing it as an appendix and referencing it with a short ... footnote ... in the text!
Footnotes, of course, are often more interesting than the text itself, especially where they contain elaborations or quotations, rather than just references.
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