Heidi,
Thanks for the nice quote about footnotes (and the footnote to it.) And thanks to Mike for reminding me that others share my warped sense of fun.
Notes have a variety of functions. I was just talking to my graphic design seniors last week about how their use can affect both writing and design. I like explanatory/commenting/aside notes that add a contrapuntal aspect to writing but believe those should mainly be side notes. (I prefer that the side notes also line up with the specific text they refer to so the reader can find the way back and forth with least disruption.) What I’m writing now is meant to contain the reference needed for understanding in the text itself so end notes can suffice for those who want to follow up. (The project is meant to be a broad introduction so I hope the end notes will encourage further reading.)
I find the various forms of notes popular in the humanities and social sciences (Author year) to be disruptive of reading. I’d much rather have the writer take the time to say "As Author said in her essay about footnotes, 'include a note that makes it easy to locate the original but don’t disrupt the reading any more than needed' so that I don’t have reminder that someone is performing being academic rather than just communicating with me" and then provide a way for me to locate the essay easily. (And, of course, I know that few writers have control over things like note styles.)
As the Anthony Grafton quote indicated, notes can enrich the experience for the reader and invite said reader into the larger conversation. Another aspect of that is the ethical notion that we owe it to the conversation and to ourselves to thank those we learned from and, by extension, those *they* learned from.
I was happy to see that a few of my students were at a point where considering note styles was something they were ready to deal with, along with debates about em dashes vs en dashes with tight spaces, tick marks vs primes, etc.
(Before I could hit "send," Ken posted a link to the Grafton article. Speaking of thanking those we have learned from, thanks, Ken.)
Gunnar
Gunnar Swanson
East Carolina University
graphic design program
http://www.ecu.edu/cs-cfac/soad/graphic/index.cfm
[log in to unmask]
Gunnar Swanson Design Office
1901 East 6th Street
Greenville NC 27858
USA
http://www.gunnarswanson.com
[log in to unmask]
+1 252 258-7006
-----------------------------------------------------------------
PhD-Design mailing list <[log in to unmask]>
Discussion of PhD studies and related research in Design
Subscribe or Unsubscribe at https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/phd-design
-----------------------------------------------------------------
|