Footnotes

Barbara has agreed to type a few pages of Rosemary’s paper “Plato: Teacher and Theorist.” There are lots of footnotes, because professors like footnotes, Rosemary explains, especially if they’re in French or German. Rosemary’s, alas, are in English.


Beverly Cleary, Sister of the Bride (1963).

A show of hands: who remembers working out footnotes with a typewriter? I did it with at least one undergrad paper, after making the mistake of asking the professor whether he preferred endnotes or footnotes. The trick, as I remember it, was to count the number of characters and spaces in the text of the note, turn that number into lines, and measure up from the bottom margin. It was all very approximate. I must have ended up retyping one or more pages.

Related reading
All OCA Beverly Cleary posts (Pinboard)

[Don’t boo me: I was out in the hallway when I asked the question, not in class. There was never a directive to the class, and I never again made the mistake of asking.]