What pisses me off are the books with no endnotes or footnotes at all. I've wasted god knows how many hours essentially re-reading books to find one or two crucial sentences.
If the book were in an electronic format, I could just use "find on this page" and I'd be done in a minute.
Gawd, Quiggen is so right about this, and your position is so poncey.
I agree with the policy of reading endnotes first.
I don't understand why the meaty asides cannot be printed as footnotes. It is the page turning in general that is the annoying part. It is only exacerbated by the uninteresting notes.
Using two book marks seems a little extreme.
What pisses me off are the books with no endnotes or footnotes at all
Yeah.. fuckin' novels.
(Fuckin' novels *not written by David Foster Wallace*)
God, you're weird. But I hate endnotes generally. Why not footnotes? Easy to find, easy to read, easy to use, now that we have the magic of word-processing.
I think, on reflection, that one of my recent rejection letters is best explained by the reviewer's failure to actually read the endnotes-- oh, look, your misreading is dealt with explicitly, but you didn't bother to look. Funny enough, the notes used to be foot-, but the journal requires end-.
4: Exactly right. I can't formulate any explanation for why people would and are pretending otherwise.
Funny enough, the notes used to be foot-, but the journal requires end-.
It appears the journal put its foot in its end. Or perhaps in yours.
Why not footnotes?
I'm not sure, but maybe because if you have many or long notes, they start running into the next page, which causes its own kind of flipping back and forth, and can get a little confusing. Just speculatin'...
Why not footnotes?
1. Because whiny consumers profess dismay at those little blocks of text at the bottom of the page, and trade publishers listen;
2. Because university press publishers claim it's costlier to put in footnotes than endnotes.
My ideal would be footnotes for anything with text, endnotes for pure references. Some books do that, and I'm very fond of them for it.
2. Because university press publishers claim it's costlier to put in footnotes than endnotes.
Because it increases page count?
13 -- if you think about it, you will see that that could not be the case.
12 -- do they mix numbers for endnotes with asterixy symbols for footnotes? That would be cool and not that I think of it I maybe have seen this. Using numbers for both would be way confusing.
Because it increases page count?
That (which doesn't make sense to me; isn't it the same amount of text wherever it goes?), or that the typesetting itself is more expensive. I've heard both.
Because it increases page count?
That (which doesn't make sense to me; isn't it the same amount of text wherever it goes?), or that the typesetting itself is more expensive. I've heard both.
Yeah, references are numbered but explanatory footnotes do the star, dagger, double star, double dagger, and so forth routine.
13 - Based on my (admittedly limited) experience in publishing, it likely is a pain in the ass for editors and the people actually laying out the book. Nobody listens to them, though, so I'm unsure why this would actually lead to results.
My worm book is done with the footnotes for thought / endnotes for reference split. It's a pain at the proof stage, but it does help the reader. Yes, publishers don't like it.
The one nice thing about setting a book with endnotes as opposed to footnotes is that the endnotes can be contained in a completely separate file. That means a little bit less unpredictability in repagination during the editing process. And while I never cared about page-count during my brief experience with publishing, it's true that endnotes would mean at least a couple of extra pages, for the section breaks before and after the endnotes.
it's true that endnotes would mean at least a couple of extra pages
Granted; but 13 was positing that footnotes would mean extra pages.
In my limited experience with publishers, I was told that footnotes somehow put readers off. Who those readers would be with academic presses I can't even imagine. In reading history or law, I would want the notes to work both as citation and as a discussion of issues about the sources or how conclusions were drawn from the sources.
I'm genuinely bothered that the pieces I've done that have notes are doomed to endnotes and not footnotes, because I want the reader to have that easy choice to read them or not.
Collections like this sometimes have the worst possible result, endnotes at the end of each essay. Yuck. But endnotes are certainly better than no notes at all, or putting notes on the web.
17 -- if a passage needs both citation and annotation, does it get a symbol and a number both?
Another yay footnotes, boo endnotes vote.
But *reading the endnotes first*? Yeah, my ass you do that. I refuse to believe anyone is that anal-retentive, not even you, Ogged.
It's fun, B (o-fun, perhaps), not anal.
Who am I kidding, o-fun is all about anal.
It's a fine line between reading the endnotes first, and throwing sofas off of rooves.
Reading endnotes = fun. Wow, I bet you're a great date.
"Reading endnotes" is an anal sex euphemism, obviously.
28: Hard to believe he's single, no?
throwing sofas off of rooves
Awesome: the OED lists as one of the archaic plurals of "roof", "reef".
Reading the endnotes first is cheating, like reading the last chapter of a detective story right after you get to the first murder.
Reading endnotes first is just common sense.
What I want to know is whether any of you read the underlying scientific study before the mainstream press article about it.
(What brought this to mind is a recent article on a study showing that easy access to Plan B did not increase pregnancy rates -- the Yahoo News summary was so dreadful and self-contradictory that I gave up in exasperation.)
I too like reading endnotes a bunch at a go.
I'm amazed that people would need to spend time laying out a book—LaTeX, people! It's the shit.
That (which doesn't make sense to me; isn't it the same amount of text wherever it goes?), or that the typesetting itself is more expensive.
It's likely that it increase page count slightly (in that you have to allow for space between the footnotes and the body text on each page that you have footnotes, rather than glomming it all together on notes pages), but the real fucker is with the pagination and proofreading issues--it's a real drag going through a book for the third time to ensure that the notes are on the correct page with it's corresponding call-out as edits are made and text is shifted around. Unlike in Word or other wordprocessing programs, this is not an automatic process in Quark or InDesign (I know for sure on the Quark, and believe this to be the case on InDesign), the primary tools used for book layout.
Disclaimer--I was a production editor for textbooks for three years, but that stage of my career ended 8 years ago. Things may have changed.
I like LB's solution in 12.
I hate ibid and old-fashioned citation rules. In Classics, we were very modern about those things and you could always just use a short-form citation.
The Blue Book rules for legal academic writing are such a pain in the ass. I hate ibid, because I love the capabilities of my word processor. If I delete a sentence with a reference in it, my footnote/endnote numbering coems out fine. If the next note is an "ibid," I have to retype the thing.
God, I'm tired. The Bluebook uses id.. Right?
I'm not big on footnotes, except to address issues referees forced me to write about that don't really belong in the piece. But damn is endnote great - set up that citation style once and your bibliography is good to go.
I sometimes read the bibliography of a paper first if I can tell the topic but not the approach from the title or abstract.