Cite It, Confound It!

I've recently either completely read or skimmed through five or six non-fiction books, all of which have this in common: a lack of footnotes.

First of all, I'm cool with that. Really, I am. I understand that most publishers of popular non-fiction are trying to please their readers, people who get bogged down in footnotes. Even if they don't read them, those pesky little numbers and that pesky 5-point font can just drive most folks crazy. Second, publishers of popular non-fiction probably think, "Hey, let's leave all that stuff to the academic folks. They love all that crap and we really don't want or need it."

So okay, the masses don't like footnotes. But we still need some kind of documentation, don't we? The solution? Endnotes.

I'm cool with that, too. Just plug that little number in the text and I'll happily look for a corresponding number at the end of the book. (If I really want to, and sometimes I do.)

But what I'm not cool with is a section of endnotes with the first, last or middle part of a sentence in quotes followed by a citation. You see the endnotes section with a heading of "Chapter One," followed by something like this:

"...so then I told D. Cheney he could kiss my..." Author interviews and email communications with----

And that's it. So I'm supposed to fish through the entire chapter to find that quote? Some books at least give you the page number so that you only have to waste a smaller portion of your time.

Maybe this practice has been around for awhile and I just don't read enough non-fiction to know it. If so, I guess I'm a non-fiction Philistine who needs to get with the program. But with a lot of the non-fiction I read, I want to verify the veracity of the statements I read. I want to know where this information came from. I don't want to go on an expedition.

Okay. End of rant. Thanks for letting me get it "off my chest."1

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1 Sorry, I know this isn't a real footnote, but was this really so intrusive?