Limiting the Number of Footnotes
For a series of references to the same text, it is possible to cite the text in full the first time and then to incorporate subsequent page references into the text, normally in parentheses after quotations. For example:
'New York [...] is the most forlorn of places, the most abject. The brokenness is everywhere, the disarray is universal' (p. 23).
When you cite the text in full the first time, your footnote should end by stating something like 'Subsequent references to this edition will appear parenthetically within the text'.
References clustered together in a single paragraph of your work can be grouped together in one footnote, provided it remains easy for your reader to interpret what is being referenced.
Abbreviating the Footnotes
The first time you cite a source, you should provide a full reference containing all the information mentioned in the preceding exercises. Subsequent references to that source should, however, appear in their simplest intelligible form. Often this will be simply the author's surname and the page number. For example, after citing Susan L. Hall's article 'The Last Laugh: A Critique of the Object Economy in Margaret Atwood's
Oryx and Crake' in full, you could subsequently refer to it in a footnote simply as:
Hall, p. 190.
If giving only the author's name could cause confusion (where, for instance, you cite other works by Susan L. Hall), you should give a shortened form of the title. For example:
Hall, 'The Last Laugh', p. 190.
<<< Previous Next >>>
