The footnote has a bad reputation, and most of it is deserved. It is where academics hide the arguments they are afraid to make in the open, where lawyers bury the clause that will matter, where a certain kind of novelist goes to be clever at the reader’s expense.1 When people say they hate footnotes, they usually mean they hate being made to look down at the bottom of the page and find that the real conversation was happening there all along.
I want to defend the footnote anyway, because I think its bad reputation comes from bad use, and good use is one of the small pleasures of reading.
Two voices
A good footnote is a second voice. The main text speaks at the pace of the argument; the note steps beside it and says something the argument has no time for. A source. A doubt. A joke that would break the paragraph if it were told inside it. The reader can listen or not. That choice is the whole point: a footnote is the only part of a page that asks permission.
This is why I set my own notes beside the text instead of under it. On a wide screen they sit in the margin, next to the line they belong to, so the second voice is heard at the same moment as the first.2 On a phone, where there is no margin, they go back to the end, like the notes in a paperback. Either way the main text never stops to wait for them.
A rule for notes
I keep one rule, which I break only on purpose: a note may add, but it may not rescue. If a sentence needs its footnote to make sense, the sentence is wrong and the note is a bandage. The test is to read the essay with every note removed. If it still stands, the notes are a gift. If it falls over, they were scaffolding, and scaffolding should come down before anyone moves in.
Read that way, a footnote is an act of trust. It tells the reader: here is something I found interesting, and I believe you will decide for yourself whether you do too.
Notes
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I will not name names. You know the kind of book. The notes have notes.
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Margin notes are old. Medieval scribes and their readers filled the margins of manuscripts with corrections, commentary and, occasionally, complaints about the cold.
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