Mechanics Advice: Footnotes · 1:45am Sep 8th, 2013
To see the self-demonstrating version, go here
Let's talk about notes. Footnotes, to be specific. They're controversial things, in fiction[1]. I happen to be fond of them. They can be a great place to put comedic digressions, and other asides to the reader. If used well, they can be a tremendous addition to a fic. However, if used poorly, they can ruin the reader's experience. I'm not here to discuss whether you should be using footnotes (but if you aren't sure, the answer is probably no). I'd rather talk about the implementation of them.
Footnotes are, to the reader, an interruption. If they want to read the footnote, they need to find the footnote while keeping their place in the text. On paper, this is easy. Each page holds only a relatively small amount of text. The footnotes are at most a few inches from the place in the text where they are inserted, and so it is easy to flick your eyes down to the footnote, read it, and then continue reading. Online, however, the footnotes tend to not be so conveniently placed. A chapter can easily be thousands of words long, and it is not uncommon for a chapter to run into the tens of thousands. That's fine! A chapter in a book is probably of similar length. However, a chapter on fimfiction is presented as one very long page, while a chapter in a book covers many pages. This is a logistical issue for footnotes. Footnotes here are more like endnotes in a book, in terms of separation between the marker and the note itself. In fact, using endnotes instead of footnotes is a good solution.
Let me be clear what I mean by this: make a chapter at the end of the story, and put all of your endnotes there. Use a continuous numbering scheme (that is to say, if chapter 1 contains 5 notes, the first note in chapter 2 needs to be number 6). This wasn't always possible here, but now that fimfiction provides for the rearrangement of chapters there's nothing stopping you. Putting your notes at the bottom of the chapter or in an author's note requires the user to go back and forth vertically, thus losing their place in the text (I will discuss ways to overcome this shortly). By using endnotes, the reader can simply open the notes chapter in a new tab, and tab over to it when they hit an endnote. They keep their place in the reading, and among the notes. You can even make each endnote number a link to the endnotes chapter.
If you wish to use footnotes, at least make it easy for your reader to use the find tool[2]! This is easy for the author to do, and saves the reader a great deal of inconvenience. Just follow these simple guidelines:
1. Do not use asterisks (*) to label your notes. This is acceptable in print, because (as previously mentioned) pages are small. However, using *, **, ***, etc to label subsequent footnotes does not play well with the Find tool. A user looking for "*" in Find will find the * in the text, then the ** in the text (twice), then the *** in the text (three times), and so on until they finally get to the footnotes. Looking for "* " will only find ** and *** and so on once each, but has its own problems. The user can't be sure that your footnotes look like "* [some text]" instead of "*[some text]", and if your reference is at the end of a sentence then it probably looks like "blah blah blah*.", so looking for "* " will not get the user back to the text. Remember, getting back to where you were is even more important than getting to the footnotes quickly, because it's easy to grab the scrollbar and go down until you hit comments but much harder to find your place again!
2. Be completely consistent. If in the text you use "(1)", and in your footnotes you use "1)", this can cause problems for the reader. Again, it comes back to the Find tool. Finding for "(1)" will not turn up the footnote. I've even seen a writer use "(1)" in the text and "1." in the footnotes, which is the worst possible solution. This requires the reader to constantly alter the format of their query in the find tool, or instead find for the digit "1", which will turn up boatloads of extraneous results (any "1" anywhere on the page will show up, so a comment posted at 11:12 AM will be found 3 times, and so on).
3. Use delimiters on both sides of the note number. Using "(1)" or "[1]" is much better than using "1)". If you have a lot of footnotes in a chapter, Finding for "1)" will turn up "1)", "11)", "21)", and maybe even "Read Later (321)" (Note: with the introduction of the Library, and it's use of spaces inside the parens, this is no longer a concern). Finding for "(1)" will turn up the "(1)" in the text, and the "(1)" in the footnotes, and nothing else. That's better for the reader.
[1] Outside of fiction, their use is less controversial. They're fantastic ways to provide readers with additional, but non-critical, information. They also work quite well for citations, although some style guides insist on parenthetical citations.
[2] The Find tool is that thing that pops up when you press control-F or command-F. It lets you search for a string on the page.
Not to mention that * means "any character" in many environments.