footnotes
Teppo
Gordon at the Conglomerate has a post on footnotes. I am a big user and reader of footnotes - I absolutely love them. Where else can one wax philosophical about some minor epistemological or other quirky note, where else can one flaunt one’s more in-depth knowledge of the matters at hand, where else can one find jewels of wisdom and future research questions? Its all in the footnotes.
Now, I know good writing ought to, supposedly, be footnote-free – if its important then it ought to be in the text. Even though most of the journals I submit to are footnote-averse, I still write heavily with footnotes and then later amend to meet minimum requirements. In fact, just today I was preparing a manuscript for submission for a journal that I have not submitted to before, and noted their heavy discrimination of footnoters – alas - I am now working on incorporating the twenty plus brilliant insights into the main text before Monday.
Sometimes those brilliant insights should just spawn their own papers (or perhaps just a good blog post or two).*
*What? No footnotes in your original post?
brayden
December 2, 2006 at 3:06 pm
As for footnotes and blog posts – I guess blog posts don’t really lend themselves to footnotes (I usually stick with various parenthetical comments [not everyone likes them either], though these can become so long that after awhile one can get lost in what exactly is being said), but perhaps I’ll try them in the future.
teppo
December 2, 2006 at 5:44 pm
I cannot agree more. V S Ramachandran somewhere tells what Oliver Sacks once told him about one of his (i.e., Sacks’) own books: “The real book, Rama, is in the footnotes”.
Guru
December 3, 2006 at 5:03 am