Citational and discursive footnotes
Writers of essays and dissertations can use footnotes for two purposes: to document citations from other works (citational footnotes), and to provide further discussion or elucidation of the subject being discussed in the main text (discursive footnotes). Both citational and discursive footnotes are permitted in the MHRA Style Guide. However, in humanities research in Britain, discursive or expository footnotes are rarely encouraged (they are an American vice), perhaps because footnotes are normally included in the word count.
