When should you use footnotes and when should you use end notes?

End notes used to be excused by the technical difficulties of printing footnotes. Since every decent word processor (even the one in Google Docs) can do footnotes automatically now, that excuse has been eliminated.

So here is an easy rule to follow: use end notes only when you do not want the notes to be read.

If all your notes are references, for example, end notes are fine. No one needs to read the references to follow the argument, but they’ll still be there if someone wants to do some independent research. And you should tell people right at the front of your book, “All the end notes are references only. You can ignore them unless you need to find my sources.”

But if your notes contain more information, or interesting sidelights, or amusing remarks, and you actually want people to read them, they need to be footnotes. No one has the patience to find the right note in the back of a book, and certainly no one has the patience to turn to the back of the book two hundred times in the course of reading it.

There was a certain wisdom in the standard typewriter keyboard that lacked an exclamation point. Yes, you could make one (apostrophe, backspace, period), but it was three times as much effort as other punctuation marks.

Learn the wisdom of the typewriter keyboard, and think three times before writing an exclamation point.

While you’re at it, you might learn an extra nugget of wisdom from this Monarch Pioneer, which also lacks a semicolon.

The Editor just saw this little aphorism quoted as some sort of inspiration for writers:

The first step in blogging is not writing them but reading them.

—Jeff Jarvis

Jeff Jarvis is someone who has obviously made a reputation as a journalist. His Wikipedia article is quite detailed, and shows every sign of having been written by Jeff Jarvis, who is an acknowledged expert on the subject.

Nevertheless,  the sentence loses much of its inspiring power by being either badly constructed or incomplete. The first step in blogging is reading what? We don’t know. Whatever it is, it’s not in the sentence.

The problem is that the pronoun them has to refer to something we already know. If I say “You can cook potatoes by boiling them,” the pronoun them stands for “potatoes.”

But there are no plural nouns in the inspiring quotation from Jeff Jarvis, so there can be no “them.”

Of course, a little thinking will tell us what might be missing. What Mr. Jarvis meant to say was probably something like this: “The first step in blogging is not writing blogs but reading them.”

That thought didn’t make it to the written sentence, however. And it may not be Mr. Jarvis’ fault at all. Pronouns can refer to things in previous sentences; it may be that the person who picked this sentence as a nugget of inspiration neglected to give us a previous sentence that would have sorted out the pronouns. It would be perfectly all right if Mr. Jarvis said, “Everyone wants to write blogs these days. But the first step in blogging is not writing them but reading them.” Our brains would automatically take us back to the last plural noun and tell us that “them” means “blogs.”

Without assigning blame, then, let us simply take the sentence as it stands before us for a warning. A pronoun has to refer to something you’ve already put in the reader’s brain.

UPDATE: The Editor has found the original source of the quotation. Now we know where to assign the blame.

From Humphrey’s Manual of Type-Writing, printed in 1886, an excellent example of why punctuation matters:

The New York City Police Relief Fund Bill, passed by the State Legislature in 1885, has just been declared unconstitutional by the Court of Appeals, on the ground that a comma inserted between certain words rendered the act void. Since the passage of the act and the discovery of the mistake, seventy thousand five hundred dollars have been deducted from the pay of the police, which cannot be used until an amendment is passed authorizing the removal of the objectionable comma.

It’s not just being fussy to insist that we should punctuate our writing well. Punctuation changes the meaning of a sentence, and those changes in meaning can have serious consequences. They may not always be as serious as in this example, but do you want to risk it?

Pay attention to punctuation. If you don’t have a natural sense for punctuation yourself, look for help. One of the best ways you can get help is to ask people to read what you’ve written and see if they can summarize your message. If they get the wrong idea, you’ve got problems. And exactly what wrong idea they got may tell you where your punctuation is leading them astray.

A package of dried fruit contains “raisins & dried papaya, bananas, pineapple chunks, & apricots.” On the front of the package is a photograph of a fresh pineapple, cantaloupe slices, peaches, bananas, and grapes. At the lower left of the photograph are the tiny words “SERVING SUGGESTION.”

But it is not a serving suggestion.

“Serving suggestion” is a disclaimer often used on food packaging, and often it’s legitimate. For example, you might show breakfast cereal in a bowl with milk, a cup of orange juice beside it, and a happy child eating it, and you might use “serving suggestion” to remind people that the package contains only the cereal, not the milk, orange juice, bowl, spoon, cup, table, child, and suburban house also seen in the picture.

In this case, you could have a picture of the dried fruit with a nice cup of tea on a silver platter carried by a uniformed butler surrounded by dancing girls on the wing of an airplane, and you could legitimately call it a serving suggestion. (It might not be a good suggestion, but it would be a suggestion of how you could serve the stuff.) But you cannot serve dried papayas as fresh cantaloupes. That’s not a serving suggestion. That’s just a picture of random fruit.

The words in disclaimers mean something. We expect them to be formulaic, but their whole purpose is to protect your company from liability. If you make complete nonsense out of them, they do the opposite: this example might technically make the company liable for suggesting that the dried fruit in the package could somehow be reconstituted into fresh fruit. Is it likely that someone will try to press that claim? No—but how likely is it that someone would complain that the box of cereal didn’t also include a bowl with milk? (Remember that the disclaimer is there because, at some point in history, someone did make a complaint like that.) The point of a disclaimer is to take care of the unlikely event. This one isn’t doing its job.

From the National Weather Service in Pittsburgh:

MODERATE TO HEAVY RAIN HAS FELL ACROSS THE REGION DURING THE PAST 24 HOURS

“Has fell” is perfectly correct in the Pittsburgh dialect, where the past participle and the simple past of a verb are always identical. But the rest of the country says “has fallen.” When you’re writing for a broad audience, you need to avoid regional peculiarities that make you look like a hick.

The Editor says this in spite of his deep love for regional dialects in general, and for the Pittsburgh dialect in particular. In what the schools call “creative writing” there are all sorts of opportunities to use the dialect you grew up with. But in technical writing you need to make yourself understood by the widest possible audience, and that means you need to learn to recognize your regional peculiarities and avoid them.