Endnotes or Footnotes? Some Considerations

January 6, 2012, 12:01 am

Photo: Liz West

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 copy editors and typesetters can change them with a click.

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Readers may send Carol questions about academic writing, editing, and publishing. Write to her at AskCarolSaller@gmail.com. (Please ask questions about Chicago style here.)

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jadams65

My general preference is for footnotes because it is easier to tell immediately if notes contain information of interest. I wish endnotes could somehow signal whether I would find a reference (not usually why I go looking) or interesting additional detail. As a reader, it is most frustrating when the endnotes are hard to navigate and they are an unpredictable mix of insightful detail (maybe this should just be in the main text) and obscure references.
http://twitter.com/elegantfowl pete langman

Ah, yes, you hit upon the crux of the biscuit: relevance.

If notes are largely additive, that is, they enlarge upon the point made in the text, then footnotes are a must – if merely signposts to sources, then endnotes. Notes are designed for the reader’s ease, and their potential actions must direct note placement.

Perhaps there is tiny conflict between these two points, however:

1. ‘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.’

2. ‘…copy editors and typesetters can change them with a click.’

Mostly, a footnote will be changed unless it changes the body text in its mushroom-like growth. The onrushing dominance of the e-reader, however, will render this problem moot: the reader will simply choose for themselves. Perfect.
erictho

Oh, and Carol, more to the point than my complaints about that spam post, I love footnotes and can’t abide endnotes. I want the extra info / digressions / citations at the foot of the page so I can just drop my eye and feast. I hate having to flip to the back, not only for the annoyance caused by delayed gratification but also because I lose my train of thought if I have to stop, check out the note, find it’s not as important as I had thought, then go back to my original page to read.

And don’t get me started on the evils of “ibid” and “op cit.” They are evil, and nasty, kick kittens, and cause global warming. They should be banned from the pages of scholarship.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Carol-Saller/100002198727755 Carol Saller

(I’m replying to this instead of to the previous, because there is no Reply button on the previous.) To find the Flag button you have to hover with your cursor in the lower-left corner of a comment.
dank48

“Ibid” and “op cit” also cause world hunger and uneven tire wear.

As mentioned, there are notes and there are notes. Some need to be on the same page as text, and some can be relegated to the end of the book (please, not at the end of the chapter). And there is an especially nasty corner in hell reserved for “authors” who just can’t be bothered to check their footnotes in ms rather than wait until page proofs so that they can add a new footnote 3 and blithely assume that someone else will handle the renumbering of the subsequent dozens or hundreds of notes.

I can hardly wait to hear Carol’s take on internal cross-references.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Carol-Saller/100002198727755 Carol Saller

Internal cross-references? I strike them out in a mad fury.

dank48

Good for you. Same here, when I can get away with it.

The very pinnacle of joy in the book-production biz is the author (translator, editor, contributor) who promises to update explicit x-refs and then, when the time comes to perform, suggests, “A proofreader should do that.”

beedhamm

”
(please, not at the end of the chapter)”
Dank, I believe that you worked in publishing, and I’m wondering why you don’t like notes at the end of the chapter.

dank48

It’s really merely a personal preference. End-of-chapter notes seem to me a demibuttocked compromise between footnotes, which are easily findable, being on the same page as their references, and end(-of-book)notes, which can be marked with the back flap for relatively easy location. I’m sure there are cases when end-of-chapter notes make perfect sense, but none occur to me right now.
http://www.facebook.com/people/Carol-Saller/100002198727755 Carol Saller

End-of-chapter notes are useful in contributed volumes so individual chapters can be offprinted with the notes intact.

22015822

Endnotes are okay, provided that the publisher provides a key at the top of each page (“Notes for pp. 34-57,” etc.), rather than just running the footnotes chapter by chapter. The latter format requires you to go back and forth to make sure you’re looking in the right chapter’s notes, and only then can you go to the note itself.
berkeleyprof

I worked closely with a book designer on my last, heavily illustrated book, and got an early commitment from the publisher and designer to use footnotes. It taught me how cost-prohibitive the process currently is! The current softwares used will manage blocks (text, titles, photos, and then add footnotes), and this adds another set of blocks to be coordinated by page. Everyone swooned when they saw the layout, but the poor book designer was VERY expensive, and not charging fully for his time.

I suspect that a software tweak would make this a lot easier for publishers to commit to–but software designers, in spite of a love of hyperlinks, may not yet understand the need…
Rebecca Gordon

The ideal approach to my mind would be to use footnotes for the “conversation” and endnotes for citations. The reader and author can converse without the interruption of page flipping, and the uglier citations are available for the reader who wants to pursue the author’s sources.

Of course this doesn’t resolve the problem that footnote corrections cause cascading changes in the document.

mbelvadi

Thank you! I was wondering how many people would continue to accept the false choice that it must be either/or – why not both in the same book? Numbered endnotes for citations, maybe, and footnotes with those funny punctuation marks as superscripts for textual notes. Get the best of both worlds! As a software developer myself, I just don’t accept all this whining about typesetting effort – this is 2012, not 1985, and software is quite capable of handling this gracefully. If the publishers demanded it from the software companies, they’d get it.
ovprdgs

Taking this excellent suggestion one step further: My (Naomi Scheman) recent choice for a collection of my essays was (author, date, page) in the text for citations, keyed to one, consolidated reference list at the end of the book, and footnotes for notes. The press (Oxford) agreed to this proposal without any problem. Although corresponding, so far as I know, to no standard citation practice, I think of this the most reader-friendly alternative–it avoids going back and forth from text to end-notes (I strongly agree that footnotes are “part of the conversation” and belong on the same page), while making finding full citations maximally easy.

sand6432

Chapter endnotes for edited volumes have the unwanted additional effect of facilitating the reproduction of chapters for coursepacks, which it is not in the interest of publishers to encourage (unless they get paid for such usage).—Sandy Thatcher
http://www.arrantpedantry.com Jonathon Owen

I work as an editor and typesetter for a small academic publisher, and we use endnotes exclusively. But we use InDesign, which doesn’t actually support endnotes. So anytime an author makes a change, like deleting or inserting a note, it entails a lot of manual work for us that may introduce errors like missing or out-of-sequence note callouts. For that reason alone I’d like to switch to footnotes, which InDesign handles quite well.

At least we put our endnotes at the end of each chapter rather than at the end of the book, which makes it easier to find the note you’re looking for.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Carol-Saller/100002198727755 Carol Saller

Jonathan,I’m wondering why footnotes are easier in a case like this. It seems you would have to renumber footnotes as well. Or maybe you always begin the numbering at 1 on each page?

http://www.arrantpedantry.com Jonathon Owen

InDesign renumbers and reflows footnotes automatically. The callouts in the text are linked to the notes, just as they are in Word. Delete or insert one, and all the rest of the numbers update instantly. But endnotes in InDesign are not linked—they’re just static text.

mark_leier

Maybe it’s a historians’ thing, but I like footnotes so I can check the sources, even in popular
histories. Worst endnotes: the ones that don’t include chapter titles, only listing the notes under “Chapter 27.”
http://twitter.com/perkinsy Yvonne Perkins

“Publishers believe that the general reader is put off by notes”
What evidence is there from readers to support this statement? I wrote a blog post about footnotes and couldn’t find any surveys or opinion polls to back this assertion.

It is amazing how many people are interested in this topic. One of the
most used search terms that led readers to my blog for 2010 were ones that had the word “footnote” in them.

As a reader I prefer footnotes over endnotes as trying to find a note at the end of the book takes time and fiddling around to find the note. However, I appreciate the arguments in favour of endnotes that have been aired in this forum. Recently I have taken to using two bookmarks while reading a book – one to mark my place in the text and the other to mark my place in the endnotes. This has alleviated the disruption to my reading caused by looking up endnotes so eliminated my irritation.

dank48

Yvonne, publishers don’t need evidence to believe things. I’ve heard otherwise sane professionals intone that general readers don’t like footnotes/end notes/notes in general, that general readers don’t like thin books, that general readers don’t like yellow books, that . . .

These opinions are generally articulated with the authority of Moses coming down the mountain with a pair of stone tablets, upon being asked if adultery is okay now.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Carol-Saller/100002198727755 Carol Saller

Dank48, on the contrary, publishers have every incentive to know and serve their authors and their readers. Publishers read reviews and track sales. We’re in the habit of collaborating with authors, not dictating to them; their good experience is essential for attracting future submissions, as word travels fast within academe. Quite frankly, sometimes what readers (and authors and reviewers) care about most when deciding whether to buy a book is its price. I’d be glad to hear some evidence from you in support of your statements!

gavin_moodie

I find footnotes annoying and endnotes very annoying. In my experience in my field US authors use foot and end notes far more than authors from other countries.

I almost never use end or foot notes. In my view they indicate a failure of authorial or editorial judgement. If the material is sufficiently important and germane it should be included in the main text; if not, it should be omitted.

Gopher40

Depends on the material. In sci/tech wrtiting, full incorporation would overly bulk up the text making it less readable, not desirable for all parties.

rrhersh

I may be alone in this, but I get the distinct feeling that the expense is the sole real reason and the rest is mere rationalization, pretending that this isn’t an inferior product. The thing is, I could accept the argument that using footnotes rather than endnotes would add, say, two dollars to the price of the book, and while I might be happy to pay the higher price enough others are not that the economics of footnotes simply don’t work. But being told that this is actually a superior product, despite the evidence of my lying eyes? I get enough of this from commercial marketers, thank you.

I am also mystified by “…merely strings of citations, although I suppose someone fascinated by the topic might find them lovelier than I do.” Editors are by necessity generalists. I’m sure that they occasionally have the happy accident of an assignment within an area of particular interest, but this can’t be normal. Readers are not so constrained. It stands to reason that if I buy a book, it is because I am interested in the topic: in all likelihood more interested in it than the editor was. So it seems strange for editors to base editorial decisions on their personal level of interest, and even stranger to project this onto the readers.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Carol-Saller/100002198727755 Carol Saller

Rrhersh, you’ll be glad to know that at the University of Chicago Press (where books routinely have footnotes), the decision is not made by generalist copy editors, although our opinions are taken into consideration. The author, acquiring editor, and (of course) marketing manager decide what’s best for the book.

http://twitter.com/AimazingPMC B Crutcher

To me, it depends on the complexity of the topic.
andreology

My favorite books have no distracting footnote or endnote numbers. They have the notes at the end, with references back to a page number and sentence. So if you are inspired, you turn to the end to get more info, and if not, you can read in peace. As I recall, Alvin Kernan’s Samuel Johnson and the Impact of Print used this system.
Federico Bär

gavin_moodie, fully agree with you! I dislike both kinds of notes too, but perhaps you would also make an exception for end notes containing some very short personal experience or an anecdote that is not essential, but just adds a touch of flavor to the main text.
Federico Bär

gavin_moodie, fully agree with you! I dislike both kinds of notes too, but perhaps you would also make an exception for end notes containing some very short personal experience or an anecdote that is not essential, but just adds a touch of flavor to the main text.
goeswithoutsaying

“And then the locusts will come…..”

The demise of footnotes is the signal that the end of the world nigh. Your Mr. Meyer is exactly right: Footnotes acknowledge and invite the conversation between past sources, the one the reader is reading and the embodied reader. And those long strings of citations? Those are where canons get built. If the author did you the favor of telling you what is contained and omitted in his, then they are substantive and should be easy to find.

I “get it” that publishers need to make things cheap and pretty if they can. You claim that they claim that “readers are put off” by footnotes. But readers who want to use hardcopy books are invariably discouraged from that by the endnotes and the physicality of the way we read– remembering a numbered citation and the page, then finding the corresponding note in back, then remembering what the author said and why you (the reader) thought is was worth figuring out what he cited along with that.

In short, why publish a hard copy book if you will make the practice of reading it in a correct and valuable way so hard?
goeswithoutsaying

“And then the locusts will come…..”

The demise of footnotes is the signal that the end of the world nigh. Your Mr. Meyer is exactly right: Footnotes acknowledge and invite the conversation between past sources, the one the reader is reading and the embodied reader. And those long strings of citations? Those are where canons get built. If the author did you the favor of telling you what is contained and omitted in his, then they are substantive and should be easy to find.

I “get it” that publishers need to make things cheap and pretty if they can. You claim that they claim that “readers are put off” by footnotes. But readers who want to use hardcopy books are invariably discouraged from that by the endnotes and the physicality of the way we read– remembering a numbered citation and the page, then finding the corresponding note in back, then remembering what the author said and why you (the reader) thought is was worth figuring out what he cited along with that.

In short, why publish a hard copy book if you will make the practice of reading it in a correct and valuable way so hard?
Jamus

Footnotes indeed; Carlin Barton’s The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans occasionally exhibits more footnote than text – a welcome treat not only to authenticate, but also, as Mr. Meyer believes, to initiate a conversation. Here’s to footnotes.
Jamus

Footnotes indeed; Carlin Barton’s The Sorrows of the Ancient Romans occasionally exhibits more footnote than text – a welcome treat not only to authenticate, but also, as Mr. Meyer believes, to initiate a conversation. Here’s to footnotes.
http://www.facebook.com/CABugeater Laura Brown

There have been a few books where I have found the footnotes as interesting, if not more interesting than the main text. In these situations the author was informally communicating with the reader and that doesn’t work in endnotes (ebooks if the software is well designed could make this controversy mute). The author needs to know the strength of his writing and if good footnotes enrich the text he needs to find a publisher who will commit to them.
http://www.facebook.com/CABugeater Laura Brown

There have been a few books where I have found the footnotes as interesting, if not more interesting than the main text. In these situations the author was informally communicating with the reader and that doesn’t work in endnotes (ebooks if the software is well designed could make this controversy mute). The author needs to know the strength of his writing and if good footnotes enrich the text he needs to find a publisher who will commit to them.
http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=657626958 Mike Pope

Agree with @Laura Brown. Some authors have made an art of using footnotes to amend their text in interesting, sometimes clever ways — Mary Roach comes to mind. Of course, the footnotes king was David Foster Wallace, whose prose alone, let alone the self-commenting (footnotes on footnotes not unknown) is something that people either love or hate. None of that would work as endnotes. Then again, these are not works being published by university presses, either. Overall and that said and so on, I would agree that a note that’s adding information, as opposed to just a listing of the op. cit., is more accessible as a footnote than as an endnote. If it’s just a CYA listing of where the author found his/her facts, meh, let it be an endnote.

dank48

Of course Pierre Bayle, who even if he didn’t invent footnotes, certainly knew how to use them to the fullest, e.g. in his Dictionaire historique et critique, so that when he needed to annotate something in a footnote, he put the notes to the notes in the outside margin.

Btw, you can order Bayle’s Dictionary as an ebook, but they’ve deleted all the notes, so you’re left with the circa twenty percent of the book that’s text. Some bargain.

http://twitter.com/e_elliott Emma Elliott

I’m curious how best to “change them [footnotes/endnotes] with a click.” I know InDesign does this but are there good programs for the author as she’s writing that will easily switch between the two?
http://www.facebook.com/people/Carol-Saller/100002198727755 Carol Saller

Erictho, I did click the “Flag” button–we’ll see what happens.
erictho

Thanks, Carol. I’m not seeing a “flag” button. I thought there used to be one. . . ?
erictho

Seemingly, what happens is they’ll remove my post and leave the spam one!