I hate footnotes. They take me much longer to type up than the actual paper by a factor of two to three times. Currently, I am finishing up the footnotes for a 14 page single spaced paper. I have done over 80 so far and it looks like the total will be well over 100. People tell me there are easier ways than typing them out individually. But, so far nobody has told me what or how those ways work. When I am writing I find it easiest to put the citation in parenthesis if I can quickly look it up or some cases just put citation needed after the sentence. This means I have a fair amount of work to do after writing the actual article. I am told there are ways I can key all the sources on my hard drive to be footnoted with a few clicks, but again this magic currently eludes me. So I am stuck going through each citation and typing it in the footnotes individually. I may finish this week. Fortunately, the paper is not due for a few months. But, still the fact that the footnotes take so much work than the actual paper annoys me to no end.
If you are talking citation style footnotes, rather than commentary, then most word processing systems have facilities for maintaining your set of sources and referring to them in such a way that the details will be automatically generated (and even generated in various styles according to venue).
ReplyDeleteIf you drop me an email with details about your writing setup, I can see if I knwo what you need to do to make that work for you.
Yes, I know that they do. I just don't know how to make it work yet. Marc Becker is going to show the whole department how to do this on Wed. So I am hoping this will be the final time I have to do it in such a tedious manner.
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