This isn’t meant to be a formal discussion on the differences between these two forms of annotation, but just a topic something I’ve been thinking about.
I just finished reading a biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. It was a good, interesting book about a complex man, but I had one complaint. Out of 800+ physical pages, only about 630 of them were the actual biography. That is, there were about 220 pages of bibliography, endnotes, index, and all that other “back matter.”
Mind you, this is perfectly reasonable for a well-researched biography. In fact, I find it encouraging in any book that leans even remotely into history or academia–it’s good to know the author wasn’t making the entire story up.
That’s not my complaint.
What irritated me was the proliferation of footnotes. You know, the ones that announced with an asterisk (*) and appear at the bottom of the page as an aside of some kind. It might be a short anecdote to illustrate a point, or a side note about how a specific person was so inspired they went on to become king of the world at a later date. They denote secondary information, ephemeral, not specifically germane to the discussion at hand, but tie in somehow, so that the author thought you should know. But–with over 200 pages of endnotes, why did the author need so many footnotes?
According to Wikipedia,
“A footnote is a note of text placed at the bottom of a page in a book or document. The note comments on and/or may cite a reference for part of the main body of text.” Endnotes, on the other hand, “are similar to footnotes, but instead of appearing at the foot of the page they are collected together at the end of the chapter or at the end of the work. They do not affect the image of the page, but may cause inconvenience for the reader who has to move back and forth between the main text and the endnotes.”
It should be obvious, if you’ve been reading for a while, that I love side-comments. I use parentheses and dashes more often in my casual writing than is strictly correct, since I was taught that it’s a sign of sloppy, badly organized thinking. Footnotes and endnotes, however, are more structured, more formal, and therefore more permissible than a casual aside. Wikipedia says that authors may use footnotes as signposts directing a reader to further information, as a means to attribute a quote or viewpoint, as an alternative to parenthetical comments, or as a way to avoid word count limitations on academic or legal text, since footnotes don’t contribute to word-count. (No, I didn’t know that, either.)
I’ll confess that there are times I enjoy reading footnotes. I like the feeling of getting extra, inside information, like the author is whispering a secret. (“You know, George Washington’s famous wooden teeth weren’t actually wood at all.”) It’s also true that I rarely ever flip to the back of a book to read the endnotes. It seems like all too often the note is only just a reference to some other book or letter in some library far away, and that just discourages me. (I’m not going to hop in my car and drive to Hyde Park to read FDR’s diaries, why can’t you just tell me what I need to know?) Since a footnote is on the same page, though, well, it’s just a matter of redirecting my eyes, not that hard.
But then, there are the negatives to footnotes and endnotes. The more symbols I see scattered across the page, like random cartoon swearing, the more distracted I get. Ooh! There’s an asterisk, let’s glance to the bottom … and, okay, interesting … back to the text. Reading, reading … Ooh! A superscript 1, glance to the bottom … no, darn … that’s for an endnote. That’s too much work, so back to … where was I again? Okay, that’s my spot … Reading, reading … I get to the bottom of the page and see that there’s a footnote denoted by a cross, but where was that in the text? I must have missed it. What paragraph was it in? What were they talking about? I’m re-skimming the page I just read but don’t see it…
Before too long, I’m doing my own version of cartoon swearing, and wondering why it’s taken me three hours to get through two little paragraphs. (Well, okay, I’m exaggerating for effect, but you get the idea.) And then we wonder why people have the collective attention span of a hummingbird these days!
Then there’s Footnote Fatigue. If I come across one or two footnotes per chapter, well, that’s fine. But one or two every few pages? Not to mention some that are so long they sprawl across three pages, so that I have to turn the page to finish reading the footnote and then go back to find my original place in the text? That’s simply no longer a “reasonable” use of footnotes. Between the plethora of footnotes and the 220 pages of back matter, the FDR biography I just finished had almost more “extras” than it did the main text. It was like watching an hour-and-a-half movie with the director’s commentary–only, instead of the director talking over the movie, he actually pauses it so he can ramble on about how rainy it was that day when they were filming, so by the time you’re done, you’ve spent four hours in front of the television and have no idea what the actual movie was about.
Is it just me, or should there be some rule as to how many footnotes a book can have?
Deb,
I agree that too many footnotes can be overwhelming. I find it distracting to jump down to the bottom of the page and read a footnote, but I don’t want to miss anything.
We are putting endnotes into the historical novels written by one of my clients. It may be unusual to have references in a novel, but his books are all historically and genealogically accurate. He wanted to include a lot of details that slowed down the pace of the story, so we put those details into endnotes. People who are interested in the details can read the endnotes, and people who are interested only in the story aren’t distracted or bogged down in historical and genealogical facts.
We used endnotes rather than footnotes for two reasons. We didn’t want to break up the flow of the story, and from a practical standpoint, it was much easier to lay out the book with endnotes rather than formatting footnotes on individual pages.
Hi Deb, If a book has tons of footnotes, they’d better be good.*
*Otherwise I won’t read the book. Too distracting.
Brad Shorr’s last blog post..Spiritual Renewal Monday
@Lillie I LIKE endnotes, even if I don’t read them all that often, just like I like Author’s Notes that explain how historically accurate they’re fiction (or non-fiction!) is. I’m all for authors making stuff up, but I like to know what’s real. I’ll never complain about a lot of back-matter–it just shows responsible research and writing.
@Brad–Exactly! Well put!*
*(And I mean that)
–Deb’s last blog post..Footnotes and Endnotes
I find it interesting that writers would use footnotes to get more words into their word count. I’m in complete agreement with you, and I have experienced the exact same frustrations with footnotes when there are just too many of them – and they definitely interrupt the flow of reading. Sometimes there’s just such good stuff in there though!
Melissa Donovan’s last blog post..Homophones: Two, Too, and To
@Melissa–that’s the trick they use to keep you reading more–they throw enough interesting stuff into the footnotes that you keep going back to read the boring ones…