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
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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. ↩
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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. ↩
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