In the last 20 years, publishers have made a major shift toward preferring endnotes over footnotes. The change has been so complete that, apart from in Journals, it can be hard to find a book today that uses footnotes. I (and many I know) far prefer footnotes for many good reasons that are probably self-evident to readers of this blog.
When quizzed, publishers normally have two replies: (1) Endnotes are easier to format and (2) footnotes make books appear overly academic, and readers don't like that.
The first reason is ludicrous--when in history has formatting been easier than in our computer-dependent age? (My 1996 Word program seems to do it just fine.)
Questions about the second reason occurred to me today as I was re-reading TF Torrance's brilliant book "Reality and Evangelical Theology: The Realism of Christian Revelation". The publishers (IVP) have opted for endnotes. Accepting my critique of objection (1), what about objection (2)--that footnotes make a book appear too academic? Well, here is a random quote from TFT's book:
"If we work with a set of assumptions antecedently and independently reached which will not allow us to reckon with a congnitive relationship to God objectively grounded in the Being of God himself, and if accordingly we refuse to accept that what it mediated to us in the Holy Scriptures is epistemically and ontologically grounded in God's own Word, then we are found to interpret the Bible in a radically different way than we would if we rejected that set of assumptions."
Are we to believe that a reader of "Reality and Evangelical Theology" will be lured by the lack of footnotes into thinking this is a popular-level text? Are the endnote going to throw them off the scent? Or conversely, are there people out there who, whilst being intelligent enough to understand TFTs prose, and nonetheless beguiled and overwhelmed by the intellectual challenge of a page with footnotes on it?
I submit that the move to endnotes was a bad decision, with no decent argument behind it. Anyone with me on this one?
The rant has now ended. Go in peace to love and serve the Lord...
11 March 2006
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
12 comments:
I HATE endnotes,
And I quite enjoy the asides that authors can place in footnotes.
Rant away, I am with you on this one
Tim
I'm totally with you!
Rory,
I couldn't find the reference to the Torrance book you mentioned in your blog. Have you invented a new way of referncing? Fend-notes: let the blog reader fend for themselves in finding references!!
For my feelings on this subject, see the footnotes below.
Steve Mc
I agree. All that flipping between the page you're on and the end of the chapter is very annoying.
As a graphic designer I can offer some insight into reason number one though. Page layout programs operate with a different paradigm to programs such as MS Word. Using footnotes usually means manually placing a text frame on the page where the related index is. So even the addition of a mere comma or a line break in the text will require checking that all the footnotes are still on the right pages if the text has reflowed between pages, not to mention all the problems with clashing and overlapping frames. I would imagine that there are some plug-ins to help with this problem, and programs such as FrameMaker ($$$) may handle this with ease, but only the latest edition of InDesign (for example) has added rudimentary built-in ability to handle this complex layout problem.
Thanks for that Dave. I didn't know any of that. Is there a chance that, when technology catches up, we might see a return to footnotes?
Good call Rory. What David C says about page layout programs is true, but for creating a book you should be using a typesetting program like LaTex, not a page layout program. Something like LaTex does all the hard work for you as long as you know how to use it (which isn't that hard really), and in a typesetting program footnotes are no harder than endnotes and they never do the dumb stuff that Word does (eg. putting the footnote and its reference number on two different pages).
Maybe the best solution is to go for a European approach and stick it all in the body of the text but in a smaller font. I quite like that in Blocher and Barth (now I just need to learn Latin so I can read them!)
I'm with you on this one, Rory. I really enjoy reading the notes -- in a footnoted book, I will generally read almost every note, whereas in an endnoted book I generally don't bother to track down the notes. It's just too much extra time and hard work.
Recently I read a magnificent biography that had over 300 pages of endnotes -- and the publishers hadn't bothered to add any page headers to indicate which pages of main text the notes corresponded to! This was simply ludicrous -- every time I wanted to find a note, it was like searching for a needle in a haystack.
So I say: bring back footnotes, and let endnotes pass into oblivion!
Rors,
I think it depends a bit on what the content of your footnotes or endnotes is. I've read some books that use endnotes for extensive referencing, so the endnotes have details of the books and some comments about the relevent parts of the books—quite a lot of text. For notes like this about further study and references, I think end notes are good—they don't disrupt the flow of the reader reading the body text.
On the other hand, if most of the notes are short, or there aren't many of them, then I say they should go in as footnotes. Like Ben Myers said, I never bother tracking down endnotes—too much hard work!
I'm surprised by this--have you really taken a survey of footnotes vs. endnotes in current publishing?
I'm an editor with InterVarsity Press. While that particular Torrance book has endnotes, most of our academic books these days have footnotes. In fact--I can't find my copy right now--but I wonder if that book isn't printed directly from the original Eerdmans version (from 20+ years ago?).
You're right--it's not difficult to format footnotes these days, so we do it quite regularly. In academic books at IVP, it's pretty much the default option. The only instances where I favor going the endnote-route is when we don't want to chase off a more general. Many non-academic readers actually are put off by footnotes.
Thanks everyone for your comments. Good news from IVP--long may 'footnotes as the default option' continue.
I trust you have all seen the discussion of this issue over at Faith and Theology? Some great comments over there, as well as a link to a blog hosting a vote on the issue (at present, 100% in favour of footnotes!).
I wholeheartedly agree that footnotes are the only way to go. My students seem to think I'm nuts. Apparently other faculty let them submit papers using parenthetical references. I tell them that I want them to learn to put their side comments in footnotes instead of all over the page.
For those having problems with MS-Word placing the footnote on the wrong page, I have a solution. Apparently, Word is too simple to be able to calculate line heights properly. If you use single or double spacing in your styles, Word is incapable of determining how much space is available at the bottom of the page until after it has written to the end of the text block. It then places the footnote in the next available space, the following page. To solve the problem, switch your MS-Word styles in the Normal template to use fixed height lines. I use 12pt lines with an 11pt font, or 24pt for double space. You also need to set the line height in the "footnote text" style. I use 11pt lines and a 9pt font. If you change your Normal template, then you will not need to correct these things everytime you start a new paper.
Since making this change, I have not seen another misplaced footnote.
Post a Comment