Footnotes!

The comments responding to Keiran Healy's post on Schama drifted into a discussion of footnotes, endnotes, and citations in general. This gives me the perfect opportunity to outline my preferences on citations (some of which are shared by CT commenters). Writers who have me in mind take heed! In no particular order:

Parenthetical citation blows. It interrupts the flow of the text and doesn't provide enough information to know what's being cited anyway.

Footnotes are better than endnotes. It's incredibly annoying to have to flip to the back of the book to find a citation. Again, I want my reading experience to be as smooth as possible. It's far easier to recall your spot on the page and read a footnote than flip through the book and hold the original page.

That said, if you're going to use endnotes (which, understandably, makes books look more accessible to general readers), be sure to include the range of pages covered at the top of each page of notes. Without it, you can open to the middle of the endnotes and not even know which direction to turn to in order to find the note you're looking for.

Please include a bibliography independent of the notes. It's okay to omit some of the publication information if you're going to be citing a given source lots of times. But don't make me find the first citation of it to figure out just what it is. Besides, readers like me might be interested in the sources you used without caring exactly how you used them.

That's it. Is it so hard to make me happy?

UPDATE: Oh, and lest you complain that footnotes and endnotes are a pain to format, I urge you to get with the times and use Endnote or some similar software. Who knew that keeping track of references and footnotes could be so easy?