You know what's great about footnotes? You don't have to be concise.
When you're writing regular words, you have to be careful and ruthless and measure every sentence. Too many words = death.[1] But footnotes are party time, baby! Footnotes are the wild nights of writing that take place in back rooms and behind blank doors that lead to mysterious rooms at the tops of narrow staircases.
Most footnotes should be skipped. But sometimes footnotes are a vast expanse that can be enjoyed like a hike in the mountains. So it surprises me that more writers don't indulge in them. Even I, who will freely admit to a footnote fetish, rarely really let it loose in footnote-land. What's up with that?
Either I'm wrong, and footnotes aren't actually any different than regular writing, or, it's just a case of blue-pill thinking: we haven't yet realized that there is no regular writing.[2]
In this case, death is boredom. Nobody likes to read somebody who uses too many words to say what they mean. When I read a thing, I want the writer to get to the point or make me forget that I haven't gotten there yet. But when I read a footnote, I usually accept that the contract is different: footnotes aren't compulsory, and therefore writers don't have to follow the boredom = death rules. ↩
Third option: footnotes need the regular writing to exist. It's only when a writer actually works at their words that they can be free in their footnotes. ↩
I've only really started leaning into them in my professional writing.[1]
Even then, it's mostly to jam the extra crap my coauthors thought was important somewhere. ↩
...but were obviously wrong.
here for the extra crap
To me
If I correctly understand the sense of this succinct observation ...
....human life is but a series of footnotes to a vast obscure unfinished masterpiece[1].....footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness. I can never dare to overlook them.
Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire ↩
When it comes to my writing style, I’m a fan of parentheses, but footnotes not so much. I think I prefer to spill out everything in one location
This may be a still greater way.
Nabokov's greatest novel, Pale Fire, is literally comprised of a 1000-line poem followed by a series of endnotes[1] in which the actual plotlines of the novel unwind.
But yeah, footnotes can have whatever an author wants them to have (see also Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett's use of them in humorous novels).
Which, yeah, aren't exactly the same thing, but they're pretty close. ↩
I love footnotes! But I think too many of them in a text can also become distracting.
I think it's similar to having too many links in a text. It creates a scattered reading experience, even though you know you don't have to follow the link right now, but you still feel like you should at least not forget that there was a link so you can come back to it.
The anxiety of the unfollowed link is real. This is why I hate endnotes (in print books).
You've got a point that on webpages, footnotes are effectively endnotes, and too many will produce that horrible feeling of needing to go back to do something.
Ever read Hans-Hermann Hoppe?
Man, that dude has some footnote game going
I don't recall that. Guess I should read some more Hoppe.
Like, his most distinctive writing feature haha
I love using them[1] as chaotic as possible[2]. I can do parentheses[3] but they lack that aesthetic that only footnotes can provide[4]
because who doesn't like jumping up and down ↩
imagine lots of footnotes ↩
oh shit is the reader still here without vomiting? ↩
I gotta stop ↩
I am, of course, joking please don’t use footnotes like this.