What Is The Difference Between Footnotes And Endnotes And When Should Each Be Used ?

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When writing college papers in the APA style (or any other), you need to consider certain guidelines you must follow. One of these guidelines that seems the most mysterious and hard to decipher for college students is the usage of footnotes and endnotes.

When writing college papers in the APA style (or any other), you need to consider certain guidelines you must follow. One of these guidelines that seems the most mysterious and hard to decipher for college students is the usage of footnotes and endnotes. However, once you understand what they are and when to use them, your writing and editing process becomes much easier. You just need to follow a few simple rules, guidelines and writing tips.

Footnotes and endnotes are the formatting structures used with college papers to give credit to sources used within the paper. Proper usage gives credibility to you as a proficient writer. When referencing sources within a paper, you can use them in a general sense; you can paraphrase them or quote them verbatim. You should notate each via the footnotes and endnotes, even citing vague references to their sources. The notes ...
... are then linked with the full information about the source including exact pages of the works in summary lists at the end of the paper. These lists are called Works Cited, References and Bibliography.

The difference between footnotes and endnotes is actually very simple: you place footnotes numerically at the bottom of the page where you use a source, and you place endnotes in numerical order at the very end of the paper on their own page, usually titled "Endnotes" or "Notes."

When using a source for the first time in a paper, you must include a full, complete footnote or endnote entry. Within the paper, type a "superscript" number a half space above the line after a reference, or after the very last word of the reference. Your computer or word processor should have a function key or command for "superscript" to get the spacing just right. When adding the footnote citation at the bottom of the appropriate page, use the same superscript number placed at the very beginning of the footnote.

Here are a few more writing tips for you to follow: only use one sentence in a footnote or endnote citation. There should only be one period or one "full stop" used within each footnote or endnote. However, in the Bibliography, each reference should be comprised of a minimum of three sentences or statements, i.e. three periods within each entry. To illustrate: There should be periods after the author, the title and the publication information.

While committing these writing tips about footnotes and endnotes to memory can be useful for writing papers during your college experience, fortunately we live in an age where technology can do many of these kinds of things for us. The good news is there are a variety of strong options for letting formatting software do this work for you. Take the tedium out of writing papers by choosing a quality formatting software program, and you will free up your time, energy and focus to write amazing papers your teachers will love -- all formatted easily, effortlessly, and accurately.
Resource: http://www.referencepointsoftware.com/