Having read hundreds of textbooks in my day… I absolutely love this footnote from a textbook, which I saw on College Humour today:

This chapter might have been called “Introduction,” but nobody reads the introduction, and we wanted you to read this. We feel safe admitting this here, in the footnote, because nobody reads footnotes either in this book.

The footnote is from a book called Stats: Modeling the World, 2nd edition (2007) by David E. Bock, Paul F. Velleman, and Richard D. De Veaux. Sounds like the type of book I wish I’d read when I was suffering through statistics in first year psych and third year sociology!

I love reading footnotes! Although I rarely use them in my writing, unless it’s a very large client report and I need to further explain unavoidable socio-lingo. My thesis supervisor put me off using footnotes – he would always say “If it’s worth saying, say it in the text!”. Nevertheless, I also like reading this Footnotes, a journal by the American Sociological Association.