To make progress in thesis writing, ignore the footnotes

Introduction

One of the tips I give in my Top 10 Dissertation Writing Tips has to do with the creation (or no creation) of footnotes during the writing phase.

In this post I wanted to expand on that idea.

Footnotes may be a potential time waster

In the early stages of my writing, I often found myself creating finished footnotes in my document.  I think this gave me a sense of accomplishment because my drafts had a semi-finished look to them.  In addition, the footnotes served to document the sources I was using. For me, once something was in a footnote, it meant that I had researched the source and had gotten the title, date, publisher and page number exactly right.

There was only one small problem with my fool-proof footnote method.

During my re-writes, I would often delete certain paragraphs and with it my footnotes.  Thus, whatever effort I had spent in getting my footnotes in place was promptly wasted.  This wasn’t so bad if a footnote contained only one reference to a single book.  Sometimes that footnote took up a quarter or half the page as I summarized an article or referenced several sources.

The end result was that I could never foretell whether a footnote was going to make the final cut and thus ANY time spent in creating them was potentially a huge time waster.

Footnotes kill your productivity

Perhaps more important than potentially wasting your time, the creation of a footnote always interrupted my flow of thought and my writing.  I could be making very good progress on a part of my thesis or a particular paragraph, and then BOOM, I would hit a footnote and take time to place it into my document.

The interruption was a few moments to several minutes.  Yet regardless of the time factor, I could not escape the fact that I had killed my writing momentum.

Document what you need and then move on

Thus, if you really want to make progress in your writing, what you must do is simply document the need for a footnote, jotting down the essential information, and then continue with you writing (Johnson, The Book of Acts, 39).

You can see a sample at the end of the last paragraph.  Here is another example, this time with only the author’s name and a note to self that I need to track down the page number (Wright, need page #).

Finally, you can have a footnote reminder, a kind of little message to yourself to prompt you for a full-scale footnote in the future (Footnote: Need to summarize Balch’s treatment of domestic codes in 1 Peter).

Conclusion

Rather than taking the time to create footnotes, your best bet to making progress in your writing is to jot down the essential elements you’ll need to create on in the future.

This allows you to document the important points you will need for the source, but without interrupting your flow or train of thought.

The result is the best of both worlds, speed combined with accuracy.

Happy researching!