Footnotes in a story

Don't.

Please?

Pretty please don't put footnotes in a story.

If you can avoid it, please, please, please avoid it!

If you have to use them, for the love of your readers (and me!) -- DON"T USE THEM CONSTANTLY!

There are few things more irritating than trying to read a story with "(1)", "(2)"..."(n)" scattered through the prose like pepperoni on a pizza slice and then a block of 'haha fun stuff that I couldn't be arsed to work into the actual story' at the bottom of the page. It's jarring! It sucks! I'm not scrolling back up the page to try and figure out the context for a dozen footnotes. You're turning your story into an annoying puzzle. You're making it harder to enjoy. Why would you do that?!

Just. Please. Stop!

(ps: Not saying that footnotes don't have their uses, but they shouldn't be a common 'feature' of a story.)

Comments

[Damaged]

Terry Pratchett is frowning from the afterlife right now.

But I agree. In the format of a huge scrolling story chapter, they should perhaps chop things up into "pages" so we don't have to go hunting all the way to the end of the chapter to get a pun.

[Hazel Mee]

4794666
I do enjoy Terry's stories... except for his frequent use of footnotes. Even in novel format they break the flow of reading the story. The reader either has to pause when they find a footnote, page ahead to read it, and then back again to pick up the story. Or at the end of a chapter they can go through the footnotes and, if they don't remember the context, they have to page back to hunt for that tiny superscript number.

This is particularly frustrating when I'm reading a book on my Kindle.

[Damaged]

4795729
People could do some fancy work with "floating" the footnotes to the side using [figure] tags, but that would only work properly on desktop views, not on readers/phones/tablets.

[Hazel Mee]

4795745
That would certainly be a more elegant solution for on FimFic, on desktop, at least. I think that avoiding them when possible is the most elegant choice.

It's not that big a deal I suppose... When I wrote my initial post I'd just slogged through a story that was ~10-15% footnotes, and I was suffering from insomnia. My inner bitch Rarity was in control of the keyboard.