100 ways to improve your writing - Gary Provost 2019

Avoid footnotes
Twelve ways to avoid making your reader hate you

Footnotes are a requirement for research papers and are sometimes necessary for other kinds of writing. They are used to acknowledge sources, and sometimes they provide the reader with valuable supplementary material that just isn’t compatible with the overall tone of the story.

Use them if you must for those purposes. But please don’t use footnotes as a junkyard for all the words you cut from the text but couldn’t bear to part with. Footnotes are distracting, they are ugly, and they frequently work against you because the reader can’t remember what he or she knows from the text or from the footnotes.

The last word on this matter belongs to John Barrymore. He said, “A footnote in a book is like a knock on the door downstairs while you are on your honeymoon.”