BJS saidMy girlfriend gave me a book by Susanna Clark called Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell which actually seems to be famous for its use of footnotes.
"An interesting feature of the story is the dozens of fictional footnotes referencing events, books of magical scholarship, and biographies."
I.E page 72 contains 5 lines of text where as the rest is a footnote which continues for two pages. TWO PAGES! How can one get into the story if it keeps being interupted by more footnotes then actual text.
But Kirit, you never disclosed how you wrote the footnotes. Feel like sharing?
You have a good point there, but the author certainly had something that they wished to convey. That something was long and rambling and, most crucially, it didn't fit into the flow of the passage that it was part of. I had a similar thing in the essay on death sentencing in the US. I struggled for a long time in getting the structure right and eventually hit upon the use of the two footnotes to explain a couple of incidental points. I think the notes are very important for a full understanding of my points, but they also don't fit into the flow of the rest of the essay.
I guess that Susanna Clark had the choice between leaving that part of her story out, or putting it in a long footnote. She must have thought that the story would be poorer for leaving the footnote out, but that the content of the footnote wasn't important enough to the flow of the passage that contains it to integrate it to the main text. Now, whether there was some other device she could have used to convey that information without use of a footnote is another matter.
As for how I do the footnotes, at the moment I'm the only one with permission to put them in because it uses an XML extension to the Mediawiki syntax and normal users are not yet allowed to put in any HTML/XHTML/XML. The basics of it though is through the use of a <FOST:footnote> tag which has some options to control the marker that is used (it defaults to the asterisk seen in this post, but allows for a number or any other generic marker).
I've corrected the links you put in. Wikipedia doesn't support a trailing '/' at the end of article names. I've also moved the thread to the footnote page.
