I'm deciding which to use for extra information for my chapters. At the moment I am using footnotes, but I think endnotes might be more useful, some of the notes are going to be quite long I think. there is a lot of background information which I don't want to put in the chapter itself as it is peripheral knowledge, but considering the comments made by someone else in the department when I was applying it is going to be essential to place my ideas in context. The other possibility is to put some of it in the appendix, but I'm wondering if that will be too far away from the text, and therefore make it more difficult to develop the argument. any thoughts?

why not have an appendix after each chapter - this is what I did, I am in biological sciences. Or just add the info in to the intro of the relevant chapter. Because if it is that important for setting up your questions, this suggests it is necessary reading ?

I've changed what I've done quite a bit over the last year. I started off with endnotes but found it irritating to have to keep flipping back and forward to read them. I prefer the way footnotes are more immediate when you're reading something, it doesn't seem to interrupt the flow of reading as much as endnotes do. I converted them to footnotes which reads better on the whole (I think!), but Word did odd things with the longer ones when there were several on the same page, shoving them onto the next page which was slightly messy, but on balance it's an improvement. I have also moved a lot of detail from my writing to an appendix, as it was too much background info for the section it was in and was peripheral to the argument, as you've mentioned, and it seems to work better now. Why don't you wait to see how long your footnotes turn out to be, then you can move them to an appendix if it seems better nearer submission? You might even chop stuff out completely in the end, everything changes so much!

Thanks for that. The trouble is there is an awful lot of stuff that at the moment seems important, but doesn't actually fit into the main flow of the argument which is about the effect of potential changes in schools. My supervisor uses endnotes and altohugh I've always used footnotes i was wondering which is the accepted one to use nowadays.

======= Date Modified 28 Dec 2008 18:29:08 =======
Duplicate post.

I have the problem with one of my chapters. It's already 30,000 words and heavily descriptive, but the description is essential to the context of the arguments. I'm considering pulling out the majority of the descriptive text and placing it into the appendices. This will free up my word count and hopefully eliminate the criticism: 'this is too descriptive and not unique'.

With footnotes you can run the risk of ending up with pages that are 75% footnotes, and 25% text. I know this style is used a lot (particularly in the US), but I find it highly irritating because you're eyes basically playing ping-pong up and down the text. The same applies with endnotes; although this is more irritating as the reader has to flick pages back and forth.

I hope to consolidate the descriptive element of chapter into not more than 500/1000 words in the chapter, so at least the chapter has context, and then guide the reader to the appendices for a full descriptive account (possibly 10,000 words).

The only problem with appendices and PhD examiners is running the risk that they won't read the appendices at all. Apparently, many do not.

It probably does vary by subject (I'm humanities) but I've been told by one of my supervisors that if something is important enough to be said/examined it should go in the main text, not footnotes or anywhere else. I'm basically assuming my examiners just read that, with a glimpse at the footnotes to check referencing/citations are ok.