I prefer to use the term "hoi polloi" when referring to the common.
More seriously, though, I'll disagree on end notes. I hate them. A better track all together would be to forget the stupid foot-noting practice of law reviews, read some real scholarship in some other fields (pretty much any will do) to see how one does not, in fact, need a foot-note to every claim, use parenthetical references when appropriate, and then use foot-notes. It's a much easier reading experience and over-all happier and gives good practice towards writing in an actual, rather than a faux, scholarly style, where authority isn't measured in the mass of foot-notes.
I stand with Matt on this as on most things. I HATE endnotes. HATE. HATE. HATE. a) It's a giant hassle to be flipping to the back of the book every five minutes, losing my place there, etc., and b) it makes it too easy to miss important information -- with footnotes the eye has to at least scan over them.
Matt and Paul are correct. Endnotes are useless, evil things, especially when they are renumbered every chapter.
It's so surreal to read other academics talk about academic writing. There are rarely endnotes or footnotes in math that are worth worrying about before you understand the math (they usually just references). And the way math research works is either you work in the field and so there's no need for explaining the terms or you don't work in the field and so it's impossible to explain them. (That's honestly true. Trying to explain anything interesting in any area of PDEs to an algebraist is just not possible without an extensive lecture series anyways.) That system makes it much simpler to write for your audience.
EXAMPLE.Book read over weekend: 210 pages of text, followed by pp 211-232 containing the (end)notes for the first 210 pages. In an academic text this practice is wholly infuriating. My reading experience was eventually fragmented into series of intrusive curses and mutterings.[Boilerplate - The Foundation of Market Contracts ... ed. Omri Ben-Shahar]
Thus I second everything said in earlier posts about bloody endnotes.
Commenting by HaloScan
