Is there someway we can begin a grass roots movement to agree that endnotes are a bad idea? How much time has been irretrievably lost while we thumbed through notes at the end of a book.
If you are in favor of endnotes, please show yourself. Otherwise, let’s all agree from this point forward that there will only be footnotes.
In fact, I am formally putting a motion on the floor. “I move that endnotes be banished.”
Is there a second for the motion?
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I was provoked to write this post while searching for an endnote about Nicholas Wolterstorff in Jim Belcher’s fascinating book: Deep Church: A Third Way Beyond Emerging and Traditional. It is worthwhile reading. See the Z’s post here, who in turn points to iMonk.
Oh my goodness yes! yes! yes! Endnotes are simply horrendous. But, truthfully, we are perhaps a dying breed my friend. My guess is most readers would rather there by no such notes at all (endnotes or otherwise).
Such is life when we are ad fontes people in a non fontes world.
Oh. My. Gosh.
I will second, third, and FOURTH that.
My little readership knows what acid any publisher is in for if a book I review has endnotes. I just cannot for the LIFE of me see ANY sense in it. The day when footnotes made typesetting-by-hand more difficult is long, long gone. The excuse that they “bother” readers… oh, sticklebats.
Look, if you don’t like them, you don’t have to look for them. But if you read them — as the author means you to be able to read them — then the reader shouldn’t have to have two bookmarks in his book, one where he’s really reading, and one at the end of the chapter or end of the book.
It really is ridiculous and insulting to both author (you didn’t really need to write that footnote) and reader (you’re too stupid to deal with footnotes).
Not that I have a strong opinion about it, mind.
I guess I’m the fifth. Please, o please get rid of endnotes!
I read every note, whether end or foot! I recall in my Greek class pointing out a footnote in Carson’s Showing the Spirit that directly contradicted Stanley Porter’s Idioms of New Testament Greek. Dr. Blomberg went and checked and agreed with Porter over Carson (his mentor while at TEDS). Thus, every note is important and the add’l labor to turn the pages or bookmark the endnotes while reading is worth the effort. Having said that…
I HATE ENDNOTES because I sometimes get caught up reading things along the journey to the back of the book!! (Of course, that’s really not the endnotes fault, now is it?)
Okay…I feel better now ;->
Yes, I MUCH prefer footnotes to endnotes. What is even more alarming to me, though, is that I’m reading more and more books by Christian authors where others are quoted yet there is no note whatsoever to indicate who they are quoting. I really don’t like that.
Oh, Chuck, that’s a literary crime.
Warren Wiersbe is TERRIBLE about throwing around all sorts of wonderful quotations with nary a citation. I’m on the other end of the extreme on that.
Chris:
I couldn’t agree more. My publisher told me that we had to use endnotes so we wouldn’t discourage the average reader. Said it would look too academic. I’m just glad that I know what my endnotes say so I don’t have to flip back there!
I cannot think of a way in which I could be more in agreement. Endnotes are a crime against reading humanity.