castiles

It’s the FOOTNOTE! The most evil of all literary devices. I think they are like snowflakes, everyone is different; and everyone does them differently. Frankly, I don’t like using them. I think they are distracting; they interrupt a perfectly good train of thought to take your attention to the bottom of the page. Then, you have to find your place again, while trying to remember what you read that took you to the footnote in the first place. I’m all for citations hidden between parenthesis that you can overlook until you feel the need to research the idea it cites at a later time. Citations keep the thought train on the track; and footnotes derail that train into your stream of consciousness or ditch of despair, whatever you prefer.

So, I thought I would give the little guy a chance, since they’re kind of a requirement in the Law and Policy class. Here is some research that I found useful and tidbits I was not aware of:

-If you quote more than 500 words of published material or think you may be in violation of “Fair Use” copyright laws, you must get the formal permission of the author(s). All other sources simply appear in the reference list.

- Associate Justice Stephen Breyer of the Supreme Court of the United States is famous in the American legal community for his writing style, in which he never uses footnotes. He prefers to keep all citations inline (which is permitted in American legal citation).

- Some argue that the hyperlink, being the web's way to refer to another document, eliminates the need for footnotes. But from a scholarly perspective this is considered insufficient, if only because it offers no way to cite offline sources.

- APA does not recommend the use of footnotes and endnotes because they are often expensive for publishers to reproduce. However, if explanatory notes still prove necessary to your document, APA details the use of two types of footnotes: content and copyright. http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/560/04/

- Aside from their technical use, authors use footnotes for a variety of reasons:

• As signposts to direct the reader to information the author has provided or where further useful information is pertaining to the subject in the main text.

• To attribute to a quote or viewpoint.

• As an alternative to parenthetical references; it is a simpler way to acknowledge information gained from another source.

• To escape the limitations imposed on the word count of various academic and legal texts which do not take into account footnotes. Aggressive use of this strategy can lead the text to be seen as affected by what some people call "footnote disease". I also like to call it “academics foot”. (http://www.aresearchguide.com/8firstfo.html (MLA footnote/endnote examples)

Wikipedia has an interesting list of examples of how writers have used the footnote in unusual ways like telling a story within the story, and, my personal favorite (Mark Dunn’s Ibid: A Life), telling the story completely in footnotes.
Here’s the list:

• In The Banjo Players Must Die, footnotes constitute a significant portion of the entire text, and often serve to distract the reader from an already complex storyline. Other uses of footnotes in this work include insulting the reader, shedding more light on the alluded-to incompetence of the characters, and using expletives (presumably because no one reads the footnotes and the risk of causing offense is therefore mitigated).

• Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves uses what are arguably some of the most extensive and intricate footnotes in literature. Throughout the novel, footnotes are used to tell several different narratives outside of the main story. The physical orientation of the footnotes on the page also works to reflect the twisted feeling of the plot (often taking up several pages, appearing mirrored from page to page, vertical on either side of the page, or in boxes in the center of the page, in the middle of the central narrative).

• Flann O'Brien's The Third Policeman utilizes extensive and lengthy footnotes for the discussion of a fictional philosopher, de Selby. These footnotes span several pages and often overtake the main plotline, and add to the absurdist tone of the book.

• David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest includes over 400 endnotes, some over a dozen pages long. Several literary critics suggested that the book be read with two bookmarks. Wallace uses footnotes in much of his other writing as well.

• Manuel Puig's Kiss of the Spider Woman (originally published in Spanish as El beso de la mujer araña) also makes extensive use of footnotes.

• Garrison Keillor's Lake Wobegon Days includes lengthy footnotes and a parallel narrative.

• Mark Dunn's Ibid: A Life is written entirely in endnotes.

• Luis d'Antin Van Rooten's, Mots d’Heures: Gousses, Rames (the title is in French, but when pronounced, sounds similar to the English "Mother Goose Rhymes"), in which he is allegedly the editor of a manuscript by the fictional François Charles Fernand d’Antin, contains copious footnotes purporting to help explain the nonsensical French text. The point of the book is that each written French poem sounds like an English nursery rhyme.

• Terry Pratchett has made numerous uses within his novels. The footnotes will often set up running jokes for the rest of the novel.

• Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell uses dozens of footnotes referencing a number of fictional books including magical scholarship and biographies.

• Jonathan Stroud's The Bartimaeus Trilogy uses footnotes to insert comical remarks and explanations by one of the protagonists, Bartimaeus.

• Michael Gerber's Barry Trotter parody series used footnotes to expand one-line jokes in the text into paragraph-long comedic monologues that would otherwise break the flow of the narrative.

• John Green's An Abundance of Katherines uses footnotes in which he says: "[They] can allow you to create a kind of secret second narrative, which is important if, say, you're writing a book about what a story is and whether stories are significant."

• Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series exploits the use of footnotes as a communication device (the footnoterphone) which allows communication between the main character’s universe and the fictional bookworld.

• Ernest Hemingway's Natural History of the Dead uses a footnote to further satirize the style of a history while making a sardonic statement about the extinction of "humanists" in modern society.

• Pierre Bayle's Historical and Critical Dictionary follows each brief entry with a footnote (often five or six times the length of the main text) in which saints, historical figures, and other topics are used as examples for philosophical digression. The separate footnotes are designed to contradict each other, and only when multiple footnotes are read together is Bayle's core argument for Fideistic skepticism revealed. This technique was used in part to evade the harsh censorship of 17th century France.

• Mordecai Richler's novel Barney's Version uses footnotes as a character device that highlights unreliable passages in the narration. As the editor of his father's autobiography, the narrator's son must correct any of his father's misstated facts. The frequency of these corrections increases as the father falls victim to both hubris and Alzheimer's disease. While most of these changes are minor, a few are essential to plot and character development.

• In Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire, the main plot is told through the footnotes of a fictional editor.

So, I dare say that after reading up on the footnote, he and I have become friendly. I still prefer to avoid him; but when resistance is futile, I’ll welcome him to the team.

See also http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/chicago.html#examples (Chicago Style examples)

You know if you read a bunch of ibids out loud, one after the other, you’ll sound like Porky Pig. Ibid ibid ibid ibid, that’s all folks.