I have a vague memory of my first footnote. I might’ve come across it in a book or maybe while reading a magazine with my dad. I know I was young; I could barely read. I remember seeing an asterisk and asking what it was, then being guided to the bottom of the page.
Before that, I’d known the asterisk only as the star symbol on the keyboard—it was for computer coding or adding a little flair to a printout. Once I knew its real purpose, I was obsessed. I flipped through books, studying the bottom of the pages for notes. I put asterisks in my school craft assignments. “I like cats*” I wrote on one handwriting test, then added at the bottom, “*a lot.” I once put “Gabe*” in the NAME section of homework and added “*Bullard” in the footer. My understanding was that the asterisk was for information you didn’t need to share, but wanted to. I was the only Gabe in class.
In second grade, I learned about other symbols: a double asterisk if there are two footnotes, or maybe a dagger. Sometimes numbers. I had already learned to read in the most basic sense of how letters made sounds and words. But now I was learning the technical side of reading—how to operate a book. Besides footnotes, I learned about parentheses and dashes. The symbols in the top right side of the keyboard were essential to intellectual enjambment, a way of adding more information and detail into a paragraph by adding more sentences into a sentence.
In high school, the footnotes were where I put my running commentary on the book reports I had to write for English class. The body of the page had all the requirements—author biography, summary of the plot, analysis of themes and symbols—rendered in stilted, textbook-inspired prose. The bottom of the pages had the livelier bits: digressions on historical facts I’d found while researching, asides about allusions to the book I’d seen on The Simpsons, and sometimes jokes and questions to my teacher. Eventually the teacher told me the dual personality nature of my papers was unnecessary; I could write the whole thing with the voice of the footnotes and leave the dry, detached pieces behind.
This was good writing advice, though I didn’t see the lesson at first. I took it as a license to write stream-of-consciousness essays for each assignment, enlightening the reader with the brilliance and wit of even my half-formed ideas. But doing that was harder than I thought. The stream was unfocused and unbearable. It made me wonder what I’d been doing in the notes before—was I putting in personality and information, or was I just being cute by playing around with the keyboard. Without footnotes, I had to find a voice that could say more than wisecracks and trivia, it had to share the essential elements of a book report or expository essay. Not relying on footnotes made me write more carefully. It also made me read a lot more, as I hunted down any nonfiction writing that had the tone I was after.
I don’t think I used a footnote once in journalism school, outside of citations on academic papers. The rule was to write clean, precise prose. Some people inevitably take this to mean the writing is basic or free of personality, but really, it’s like the lesson I got in high school—if you want to have a personality on the page, you have to work at it.
The outlets for my writing weren’t friendly to footnotes, either. An asterisk is a hazard in a newspaper column, and it’s nonexistent on TV and radio. Most web publishing software didn’t support footnotes at the time. The digital presentation of David Foster Wallace’s heavily annotated Atlantic essay “Host” was stunning when it was new, with pop-ups and color coding. It’s since been re-coded into something even more elegant.
As I became a better writer (and as publishing technology improved) the footnotes came back to my work. Years of reading pieces like “Host” and the other DFW essays made me want to use them, but they also made me wary. I didn’t want to seem like a copycat, wasting the readers’ time doing an impression of someone else. Again, the footnotes made me a little more disciplined.
Longtime newsletter readers know I’m not shy about footnotes, but I’ve been using them less lately because the interface in an email just isn’t as smooth as I’d like it to be. I want you to read to the bottom of each piece, but I don’t want to just tell you to scroll past the words. Oddly, it’s in audio where I find footnotes work a bit better now. I add an effect to them when I narrate these pieces for the podcast. In audiobooks, there may be a second narrator who reads footnotes, or a little sound before and after.
Now that I’m also working on a longer writing project, I’m thinking a lot about how to handle notes. I’m creating a ton of endnotes for citations, all in Chicago style, sometimes with clarifying comments about how I interpreted a particular document. I’m still very early in the writing process, but I don’t know that I’ll need footnotes on the pages. It’s my first book. I hope it’s the first of several. There’s a lot I have to say. I just have to figure out how to say it.
Big News
For most of this year, I’ve been working with
and Yellow Armadillo Studios on a podcast. It’s a documentary series about Dr. Bernard Fisher, a pioneer in breast cancer research and treatment. The trailer is out now. I’d love if you subscribed.Keep reading with a 7-day free trial
Subscribe to Number One With A Bullard to keep reading this post and get 7 days of free access to the full post archives.