I can understand it when it is done as to not disturb a specific page layout, but for normal books? I can’t stand going back and forth all the time to read the notes.
Al Franken suggests in Lies Lies of Lying Liar Lie Lies Lying (or whatever it’s called) that the choice of endnotes is made to prevent the checking of sources. I doubt that that’s usually the intent, but it certainly seems to be the result.
Depending on the author and subject, footnotes are sometimes references and sometimes little sidebar items. IMO, it the notes are primarily references, they should be relegated to endnotes, but if they are substantially sidebar items, they should definitely be footnotes.
Ooh, you’ve hit upon one of my pet peeves! This happens way too often: when notes that are “sidebar items,” commenting on something in the text and meant to be read with it, are all at the back of the book as end notes, forcing me to keep flipping back and forth if I want to read them. I, too, would love to hear a good [del]excuse[/del] reason why this is done.
I disagree totally - see Lama Pacos’s post. If I want to follow up the reference, I’m going to be opening a second book alongside the first, and having to then deal with endnotes as well makes the job much more difficult.
The labor costs of setting up footnotes are hugely enormously higher than for setting up endnotes. Yeah, I know you think that this isn’t an issue in these days of computers. You don’t know publishers. Manuscripts are still marked up by hand, and getting the footnotes in the right position is a major deal both in terms of editorial time, compositor time, and printing time.
And you also appear to be in the minority in your dislike of endnotes. Most, and I mean apparently the great majority of, people dislike having footnotes interrupt the text, especially when the footnotes are merely source references. (And conversely, one can have very long expository endnotes without totally bollixing up the text.) With endnotes, they can skip all interruptions unless they truly need to look something up.
From the publishing end, endnotes are a win-win situation. You in the minority may not like it, but for most people they were a great advance over the past.
I gotta do it…cite?
The general opinion of editors, backed up by the way that footnotes have virtually disappeared. If everybody wanted them they would be there. Editors are well aware, more from anecdotal evidence than from studies - nothing is ever formally studied in the publishing world, that the vast majority of readers of popular works do not look at the footnotes at all, and would rather not have to deal with them.
You can confirm this by looking at those books with both footnotes and endnotes. There’s been a trend recently that notes important enough that they really need to be read are entered as footnotes, while the bulk of the true references are given as endnotes. This wouldn’t happen if editors thought that endnotes would be regularly read. You can see this in Al Franken’s Lies and…, as a matter of fact.
I’m a popular nonfiction author who has published several books and been studying the field for decades, so I know the trade book industry. There may be differences in heavily academic books aimed at a solely academic audience but I don’t see a preponderance of those with footnotes over endnotes either.
Maybe this is one of those things that everybody in the field just “knows” but can’t rationally back up by numbers. But it also appears obvious that hardly anyone, even fellow professionals, needs to look up every single note and every single reference. And those who don’t need to, but are compelled to (raises hand) will do so no matter where the notes are placed.
If you want further proof look at older footnoted works, like Blake McKelvey’s four volume history of Rochester, NY, with its 2000+ actual footnotes per book. It is maddening to read and that’s not just because of McKelvey’s dry as dust prose.
I never go back and forth to read all the notes. What annoys me the relatively small number of books and articles I’ve read which use footnotes rather than endnotes. It seems that the footnotes frequently take up more space on the page than the actual text.
If a note is so important that it *needs * to be read, shouldn’t it be incorporated into the text? Why use a footnote at all?
I suspect that’s Al’s small attempt at humor.
Endnotes are a bit less convenient. But if the difficulty of obtaining two scraps of paper and using them as bookmarks to go back and forth is too great for someone, there’s not much I can say about that in GQ.
It’s been my experience (and this thread seems to support it as well) that footnotes are preferred by those who actually use them, while endnotes are generally preferred by those who use neither footnotes NOR endnotes (and probably more tellingly: by those who can save a few bucks/hours by using endnotes instead.
I use footnotes routinely --in my personal writing, professional writing, and of course those provided by other authors. I prefer to write with footnotes for the same reason I prefer to read them: they are convenient and don’t interrupt the flow.
If I’ve read the source material, a glance at a bibliographic citation is often all I need (“Oh, he got that from Felgercarb. I can see where he’s coming from” or “What? Where does Felgercarb et al. 2002 say that? She explicitly refused to address that issue!”) Even when I’m not completely conversant with the literature, a quick glance at the citation can be extremely informative: it tells the nature ofthe source, the age of the material, the author (whose work I may know at least by reputation), and may help me see if the author is straining for vague support from Lysenko on molecular biology, or citing a well-known molecular biologist in a topnotch peer-reviewed journal.
Endnotes are agreed by all to be more “out of the way”, while footnotes are “right there”. The choice says something, I think, about the regard in which the notes are held by the publisher (or author): are tehy necessary nuisances or essential commentary? In fact, I would consider it a mistake to make the choice without using that as a primary consideration (but some authors wouldn’t like it if the choice was considered an open declaration that they would really rather hide or delete the notes entirely). Given my druthers, I’d favor footnotes. If the material should be there a all, it should probably be right there.
While footnotes may be a pain to place, they’d be a lot easier if more publishers or typesetters would use a word processor version as a guide to placement.
This would allow them to focus on the few genuine problem spots.
I know, I know – dream on.
I got a decent piece of advice on this, when I produced an overly-long footnote, which said “either it should be in the main text…or it should be kept for another piece of writing…or it’s not worth saying”. In the end, I decided on the latter.
OK, maybe I’ve got an overly-academic slant, but I agree with KP that bibliographic references are as important as anything else, and I would say that these are the most annoying of all to find in endnotes, precisely because they don’t involved flipping to another page to read several paragraphs.
And Exapno Mapcase - while I don’t doubt that you’re describing current opinion among publishers accurately, I also don’t accept the “we do it this way because this way people don’t complain” circuitousness.
Former book editor here. Even with computer-aided word processing and layout, footnotes are a pain to work with compared to endnotes. Most readers do not check every single source, if any. Like what was said above, just put a scrap of paper in the endnotes and in the text. If doing that turns you into a big whiner, I don’t want to hear about it.
I am talking primarily about academic texts here. Although many trade paperbacks also count. In the good old days, the texts used footnotes in almost all disciplines. The more forward looking disciplines have abandoned them. I am the technical editor of an online mathematics journal and I would never allow endnotes. The footnotes are worked in automatically by the software and take absolutely no extra time. Software that cannot do this would be worthless.
Until around 1945, mathematicians used footnotes like every one else, either for citations or side comments. Starting after the war, we quickly switched to bracketed numbered references to a numbered bibliography at the end which was listed alphabetically. For a few years, the first such bracketed reference always had a footnote saying that it was a reference to the numbered bibliography at the end. There are two other kinds of footnotes. The first kind appear on the first page to thank granting agencies, give keywords and Amer Math Soc classification numbers, that sort of thing. The second kind are true footnotes, comments and the like. They are not common, but we neither encourage nor discourage them. I never use them myself; I feel that any useful comments should be worked into the text and useless ones omitted. I think most mathematicians agree.
I dabble in linguisitcs and they use a citation style of the form [author, year]. Again there is an alphabetized bibliography at the end. I have tried to use that myself. Most journals don’t permit it (boo to them), but ours certainly does since I insisted on it. It is not catching on. Some use a style like [XXX] where XXX is a reminder of the author or title or sometimes a familiar phrase by which the paper is widely known (e.g. [GT] for Grothendieck’s paper in the Tohoku journal).
When it comes to semi-academic books, such as Jared Diamond’s two books, I HATE endnotes. They are an abomination. References can go in a numbered bibliography and anything else worth saying can be incorporated in the text or, as a last resort, in a footnote. I am astonished that there are people (aside from publishers whom I view in the same light as drug company detail men) who feel otherwise. Does anyone who actually tries to read them prefer them? I cannot imagine it.
Bottom line: endnotes are a historical relic.
Doing the whole ‘listen to your market’ thing, then? You pretty much go into my original request for a cite, which has been responded to with “we make books, we know what we’re going, m’kay?”
Are you confusing me with someone else?
OK, so I was being fairly sharp there. But seriously, what do you base your “most readers” comment on? And I’m a reader, and a book-buyer, and I’m being told I’m a ‘big whiner’. Why shouldn’t I feel a bit put out?
I noticed this recently while reading Unfinished Tales by Tolkien. The end notes in this book are invariably side information for the text, as there are no external sources. Nonetheless, I have to flip forward twenty pages to find the notes (as they are at the end of each section) and then flip back to the actual text – every time. Very aggravating.
As an author, I know very well how delicate the balance is between incorporating information into the text and making important, but perhaps technical or specialized information, information easily available for them’s as want it.
My preferred solution is to do footnotes for that technical information and let readers know from the beginning that I will be doing so consistently and that they can skip it all if they want without losing any more general information.
Mere references and sources, on the other hand, go at the back. Interrupting the flow of the page with a footnote is an abomination that is to be avoided when at all possible.
And having all the notes in a section together on one page has many advantages. Reading old texts, which had footnotes filled with ibids and op cits and loc cits and all the other Latin apparatus was often maddening as I would try to go back pages and pages trying to find what was being referenced. It’s much easier to have it all together. Putting endnotes at the end of a chapter (not at the end of individual essays, but in chapters in a book by one author) is just as bad if not worse.
References to a numbered bibliography are not the same subject at all, but a specialized instance of a different field.
So, yes, I vastly prefer endnotes for most circumstances. I cannot imagine anything else. But several caveats. First, I am talking about books, and not articles. Second, I am a social scientist by academic training and a popular author by vocation and those are not the same fields as scientific or medical technical publications. Third, academic vs. non-academic publications require different techniques for their readerships and shouldn’t be argued about as if they were one thing.