Writing and Public Speaking
Footnotes are a form of documentation used primarily by academic writers, which appear, as the name implies, at the bottom of a page of text. They tend to be numbered sequentially throughout an article or book, and they can contain a range of content, from a brief bibliographic record to an extended discussion that looks much like the text itself. Partially, as a means of signaling to readers that these notes are secondary to the main text, they are usually in a smaller font size, and sometimes in an alternate typeface.
Authors use footnotes for a variety of purposes:
Acknowledgment - letting the whole world know, for example, that without the support of their spouse, the book would never have been written.
Attribution - mentioning influential thinkers to show the intellectual heritage of their ideas, and to a certain extent letting readers know the identity of other members of the scholarly club they want to be associated with.
Tracing - showing precisely where an idea or fact was taken from the work of another, in such a way that a curious reader will have no difficulty in going directly to the source.
Validation - identifying and showing that they are building on the insights of their predecessors.
Protection - doing their best to prevent accusations of fraud, fabrication of evidence, distortion of data, and plagiarism.
Commentary - responding to their own texts, adding anecdotes, clarifications, tangents and tirades.
The number and extent of footnotes varies according to the conventions of the particular scholarly discipline for which the author is writing, with the hard sciences representing the minimalist end of the spectrum, and history representing not only the supposed source of the practice (in the works of Leopold von Ranke), but also the field in which it is quite conceivable that the amount of space in a book devoted to footnotes can greatly exceed the space containing the text they are meant to document.
Finally, from the perspective of today's publishers, footnotes are a bad thing. They raise the costs of book production, because they take up a lot of space on the page, they increase the complexity of book layout, and they require extensive copy editing and fact checking. They also serve to reduce the market for a book, because readers will view the book as too intellectual, too cluttered, or too expensive. Curiously, it appears that publishers are taking the position that, if readers want to check some aspect of the text they are reading, they can always go to the internet.
Arthur Campbell (Ph.D. - sociology) writes about world affairs, particularly on matters pertaining to religion, science, global ethics, and the knowledge economy.
