John Siracusa recently linked to an interesting post by Manton Reece:
Manton on footnotes: http://t.co/5gw7pCOno9 (I mostly agree.)
— John Siracusa (@siracusa) April 1, 2015Reece:
You know what else makes a long article easier to read? Fewer footnotes.
This trend of footnotes in blog posts is out of control. Maybe a couple footnotes work well in a very long Daring Fireball essay, but in recent years bloggers are using footnotes everywhere in places where they’re just not necessary [emphasis added]. They’re distracting and take you out of the story.
Guilty as charged 😁
For the longest time, footnotes were my blogging white whale. I remember seeing them on some of Marco’s posts and thinking, “Man, I really want to do that.”
I had been following Marco and Gruber (among other bloggers) for some time, and noticed just how different the reading experience could be depending on footnotes. Gruber used regular old “Web 1.0” linky footnotes, while Marco was using these fancy popup footnotes. I preferred the way Marco implemented them because it allowed me to read them in-place, without having to jump around the page while doing so.
When I first started out, I thought it would be impossible for me to do that, since Squarespace didn’t allow such a thing in their post editor. And once I figured out, I couldn’t get enough. I used (use) them all the time. Admittedly, I probably use them too much.
And Reece makes a good point: if they are being used so much as to distract the reader, the author is doing something wrong.
If I look back at some of my posts, I’m sure I could find evidence of all the above examples. It’s like getting a new [fast] car after having driven a not so new [or fast] one for a long time. Don’t you think it would be hard to not use the heck out of that new [fast] GT3 after put-put’ing around with a Honda Civic for all of your 20’s? Wouldn’t it be hard to not drive at 100% all the time? Of course it would be hard.
Thankfully, the ‘new fast car’ novelty eventually wears off, and then the new GT3 owner might only drive erratically some of the time. The same is true for bloggers. I think I have found a happy medium in my writing. Unlike Reece (and John Siracusa), I find that footnotes in my writing—especially the Bigfoot kind—help rather than hurt. So I will continue to use them.