Q. I use Microsoft Word and it has a “reference” feature that does part of the work of endnotes/footnotes for the author. The reference feature uses a smaller font than regular and doesn’t indent the information in the endnote. Should I use the reference feature, or should I do this manually, keyboarding in the information the same way I do the rest of the manuscript?
A. If you have a lot of notes, it makes sense to use the reference feature. That way, if a note is added or deleted during editing, you won’t have to renumber all the rest of the notes by hand—they’ll renumber automatically. You can easily change the font size of the notes text and add the indent, and with only a few keystrokes you can set all the numbers on the line with periods after. You might want to look at The Microsoft Word 2007 Bible, ed. Herb Tyson (Indianapolis: Wiley, 2007), to learn a few tricks like this.