Experiments in Style: Footnotes version

Aren't footnotes useful for expanding and enriching a text?

Please note: this post contains a preponderance of footnotes.¹

Greetings!

Welcome to my ongoing (and potentially never-ending!) project, experiments in style. The Introduction below explains what it’s all about, but if you already know then just go straight to the Overblown version, below.

Enjoy!

Introduction

One of the things I’ve been trying out is reworking a piece of text into a completely different style. A full exposition and explanation are given here:

Experimenting with styles

Here is the original text on which these experiments or transformations are based:

The original (template) text

In the middle of the night, I woke up (if you can call being semi-conscious being awake), walked purposefully towards the door to go to the bathroom — and almost knocked myself out.

The reason was that in the twin states of entire darkness and semi-somnambulance I was facing in a different direction from the one I thought I was facing. As a result, instead of walking through the door, I tried to walk through the wall.

The next few days brought nausea and headaches. After much prevarication I went to Accident and Emergency, where I waited petrified among people for whom “social distancing” means not quite touching you, and who wore their masks as a chin-warmer.

An hour and a half later I emerged into the twilight, secure in the knowledge that I had nothing more serious than mild concussion. I failed to do much writing, but I was pleased to have read a further 17% of my book.

The footnote version

In the middle² of the night, I woke up³ (if you can call being semi-conscious⁴ being awake), walked purposefully⁵ towards the door⁶ to go to the bathroom⁷ — and almost knocked myself out.

The reason was that in the twin states of entire darkness and semi-somnambulance⁸ I was facing in a different direction⁹ from the one I thought I was facing. As a result, instead of walking through the door, I tried to walk through the wall¹⁰.

The next few days brought nausea and headaches. After much prevarication¹¹ I went to Accident and Emergency¹², where I waited petrified among people for whom “social distancing” means not quite touching you, and who wore their masks as a chin-warmer¹³.

An hour and a half later I emerged into the twilight, secure in the knowledge that I had nothing more serious than mild concussion. I failed to do much writing, but I was pleased to have read a further 17%¹⁴ of my book¹⁵.

Discussion

I don’t know about you, but I find footnotes very distracting in nonfiction books, although they can be quite humorous in fiction ones. I prefer Endnotes, because what I tend to do is read all the endnotes when I’ve finished the chapter rather than continually interrupt my reading. Interestingly, reading the endnotes all in one go provides a sort of parallel narrative in its own right.

But what about you? What’s your preference?

This post is just one of a growing list of experiments in style. See the complete index here.

1. Footnotes tend to be associated with nonfiction works. However, it is amusing† to note that there are many fictional works that employ footnotes. Three that come to mind are Pale Fire, by Nabokov; Infinite Jest, by David Foster Wallace; and The Mezzanine, by Nicholson Baker.

† There is nothing remotely amusing about this point, but I saw that sentence in an academic tome once while studying at university. Needless to say, I deployed it at every essayistic opportunity. I’m delighted to report that the passage in question invariably attracted a tick by the tutor.††

†† It is a source of huge regret on my part that Substack does not make it easy to have a footnote to a footnote. †††

††† I tend not to use footnotes very often myself. However, at the suggestion of

Mark R DeLong

I have borrowed a library book called The footnote: a curious history, by Anthony Grafton. Unfortunately, I have not yet opened it. At the moment it is, so to speak, a footnote to my “To be read” list.

2. Strictly speaking, the definition of “middle” is dependent upon the time I went to bed, and the time I arose in the morning. However, I didn’t make a note of these times, so the term “middle” is to be interpreted loosely.

3. I was not fully awake, as the next part of the sentence makes clear.

4. This is as much a philosophical issue as a physiological one; I am qualified to answer neither.

5. That is, I wasn’t ambling or dawdling.

6. We like doors. Some people have open-plan houses, but we like to keep different spaces separate from each other. However, that means we have to have doors in order to get from one room to another.

7. That is, a room with a bath. There is also a shower, but the room could not be described as a shower room in the accepted meaning of the term.

8. That is, half asleep. I really don’t know why I didn't just say that in the first place.

9. The room is square or rectangular, not a labyrinth. Nevertheless, if you get out of bed at the wrong angle so to speak you could easily make a mistake of this kind.

10. Our house was built in 1909, so the walls are solid. In modern houses, if you banged your head against the wall you could face a massive repair job on the wall. In our house, the walls are so solid that if you banged your head against the wall you’d be more likely to face a massive repair to your head.

11. As someone pointed out to me, I think I meant indecision rather than prevarication.

12. Our local A & E is only a three minute drive, five minute cycle, 5 minute bus ride (excluding the time spent waiting for the bus), 15 minute run or 20 minute walk away.

13. This incident took place at the height of the Covid 19 scare.

14. I know it was 17% because I was using a Kindle.

15. Strictly speaking I should have written “ebook”.