In response to my invitation to send questions, Albert in Indiana asked about the relative merits of endnotes and footnotes in books. Mr. Meyer prefers footnotes, which allow him to “converse with readers,” over endnotes that “require leafing backward and forward through the pages.” In general I agree—but there are other considerations.
First, writers don’t always get to choose. Many university presses now more or less require endnotes, since typesetting notes at the bottom of the page requires more fiddling by technicians and is therefore more expensive. Footnotes also carry the potential for added expense when corrections are made to page proofs, since even minor changes can launch a cascading mess, bumping note callouts to different pages and dragging their linked notes with them.
Second, scholarly monographs sometimes have ugly and uninteresting notes. These are not Mr. Meyer’s “conversations,” but merely strings of citations, although I suppose someone fascinated by the topic might find them lovelier than I do. And of course some books are almost more notes than text, with the result that in the published book a large portion of every page appears in that microscopic type that, in spite of expanding numbers of bifocaled readers, has become fashionable for footnotes.
Endnotes, in contrast, leave the main text clean and uncluttered. Publishers believe that the general reader is put off by notes, period, so if a book with trade potential requires them, the notes will almost certainly be banished to the back. In spite of their unhandy location, notes at the back of a book are conveniently grouped. This can save some page-turning when a reader of a shortened citation is seeking the initial full version or trying to interpret an “ibid.” or “op. cit.” or “see note 5 above.” And while adding an endnote is not recommended at page-proofs stage, the fallout from doing so will most likely be easier to contain than if it were a footnote.
Expense, aesthetics, convenience: all must be weighed in deciding whether endnotes or footnotes are best for a given book.
Luckily for writers, none of this matters when you prepare your manuscript for publication. Unless your publisher says otherwise, choose whichever form you like, since copyeditors and typesetters can change them with a click.
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Photo: Liz West, courtesy of Flickr
A version of this post originally appeared at Lingua Franca, a Chronicle of Higher Education blog, on January 6, 2012. More reader comments are available there.