20150528.0710

Regular readers of my entries to this webspace will doubtlessly note that I do not seldom make use of footnotes in my blogging. Three of the ten entries that immediately precede this one deploy footnotes, for example, with one of them offering two notes. A quick look back shows me ten footnoted entries in the last, oh, seventy. While in terms of pages, the rate of footnoting is perhaps low, it does seem to me to be high for blog entries; I read a fair number of blogs, and I do not see so much footnoting in them as I put in mine. Why others do not use them more frequently, I am not certain; I am not going to speak to that. What I will address, though, is why I tend to use them.

My use of footnotes springs from two sources. The first is my trained academic background. The second is the tangential way in which I tend to think (and the kind of writing I do in this webspace, as in the written journal of which I have been neglectful of late, reflects initial thoughts more than studied consideration and long revision, both of which admittedly yield better prose than what I tend to put here and in my written journal). As far as the academic background goes, I have made no secret of being trained in large part as a scholar of the medieval. As befits such training, as I continue my professional development, I make a point of reading a number of journals, including Speculum and others that make abundant use of footnotes, albeit for different purposes. Many of the scholarly books which I read function similarly. Because I read so much that has footnotes, then, and because it is typical for writers to write in ways that demonstrate the influence of what they read, I end up placing footnotes in many of my texts, including those I put in this webspace. I reference sources at times, and I make statements that qualify my assertions and seek to clarify the contexts of them, which may make me seem somewhat equivocal but also shades me toward greater accuracy.

I do not always do academic writing in this space, though, even when I am including footnotes. I tend to follow specific lines of thought, not always well developed (hence at least part of the title of the blog), and doing so leads me around to other ideas than those I had initially thought to pursue. Mentioning them in footnote allows me to keep track of them for later development, as happened a few days back, when I returned to a point raised in footnote earlier. I am not always good about returning to older topics, I know, but I am far better about getting back to what I have footnoted than I am about getting back to what I have not. Mentioning them in footnote also allows me to have the idea out of my head instead of caroming about the inside of my skull or wherever it is that the mind actually resides. Enough other ideas still nag at me from within that I do not need other voices joined to the cacophony. And maybe someone will have something to say about the notes, themselves...