Footnotes
Footnotes
Footnotes; the format
There are many different types of typographical notes, including endnote, footnotes, and margin notes. Each note can serve a different purpose and has different advantages and disadvantages. An endnote is a note that appears at the end of a work and is organized sequentially in relation to where in the work the reference appears. While endnotes don’t disrupt the reader or the layout of the page, the reader has to flip or scroll to the end of the work in order to see the corresponding note. A footnote is a note placed at the bottom of the page corresponding to the item cited in the text above. Footnotes are beneficial because the notes are easily located on the same page the reader is already looking at. However, this causes a major disadvantage: footnotes can clutter a page and negatively impact the visual of the page. In many cases, footnotes may take up over half of the page. Margin notes are similar to footnotes in that the note also appears on the same page as the text being cited; however, margin notes appear in the margin of the page in a location corresponding to the point of the text cited. While margin notes are easier to follow than footnotes, they may waste much more physical space on the paper and change the layout of the page much more drastically. Footnotes are usually flagged by numbers in square brackets or superscript or symbols. Traditionally, the order of symbols went: asterisk (*), dagger (†), double dagger (‡), section sign (§), pipe (‖), pilcrow (¶), and, finally, manicule (☞).
Leopold von Ranke
In the context of history and academics, the footnote is used to both identify both the primary source and proves that the historian or academic has examined all relevant sources and constructed a new argument based on them. Leopold von Ranke, a 19th-century German historian, championed the idea that footnotes must be used for primary documents to say explicitly what happened. He is considered to be by many the founder of modern historiography. Before his time, historians would have inserted personal opinions and referenced unreliable secondary sources in the footnotes of their work.
Section 2
