Half-truths and fanciful speculation, shorn of academic protocols such as footnotes, can sound donnishly authoritative.
Such historical footnotes gave substance to the students' presentations, which were otherwise based on tours of New York streets and shops, and visits to Web sites like flickr.com, stylehop.com and fashionindie.com.
Diaries and film, found with the men's bodies over 30 years later, fill in the poignant details".Falling Upwards" contains much of the historian's apparatus, such as footnotes and bibliography, but its epilogue refers modestly to what has gone before as "a cluster of true balloon stories".
But systems, such as footnotes and editorial oversight and journalistic ethics, developed over time to minimize mistakes.
The supreme peculiarity of this peculiar publishing phenomenon is that the British are less rigid about punctuation and related matters, such as footnote and bibliographic form, than Americans are.
Indeed, in my opinion the most important statement in the whole book occurs in just such a footnote, added relatively late, at the end of Chapter 6: "[Footnote added 1925:] I used at one time to find it extraordinarily difficult to accustom readers to the distinction between the manifest content of dreams and the latent dream-thoughts.
?" Thurber even supplied some matching explanatory footnotes, such as "Probably Harry Boynton or his brother Norton".
Trust the reader (you don't need footnotes such as "the poet I refer to here is John Clare" or "Aung San Suu Kyi is currently held under house arrest in Burma"), but don't trust them too much: don't pick for your epigraph a massive chunk of Heidegger in the original German.
In her article discussing the use of paratext, or the contextualizing text printed in the book such as the footnotes and epigraphs, Deborah Bowen argues that the novel's paratext forces the reader, like in other postmodern works, to rethink the importance of such peripheral material that in other contexts will get overlooked in light of preference for the main text.
