Footnotes in your thesis: how to add them in Word and how to write them

1. Put the cursor where the number should appear in the text.
2. Go to References → Insert Footnote, or press Ctrl+Alt+F (on a Mac Cmd+Opt+F).
3. Word takes you to the bottom of the page, next to the number: type the note.
4. To go back to the text, double-click the note number.

To delete a footnote you do not delete the text at the bottom of the page: you delete the number in the text, and the note goes with it. The others renumber themselves.

In LibreOffice the command is Insert → Footnote and Endnote; in Google Docs it is Insert → Footnote, with the same Ctrl+Alt+F shortcut.

Footnotes have a style of their own, Footnote Text: set it once (right-click the style → Modify) and it applies to all of them. The same goes for the number, which uses the Footnote Reference style.

English style puts the note number after the punctuation mark: “as Calvino argues.³”. Italian publishing practice usually puts it before the punctuation, attached to the word: “come sostiene Calvino³.”. If you are writing in English at an Italian university, follow English style unless your department says otherwise, and apply the same rule from the first note to the last: examiners notice inconsistency more than the choice itself.

Two special cases:

• After a quotation, the number goes after the closing quotation mark.
• In a chapter or section heading it is best to avoid notes altogether: they would end up in the table of contents too.

If your department uses footnote citations (common in law and the humanities), the basic rule is: full reference the first time, short form after that.

• First citation: I. Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1988, p. 45.
• Immediately after, same work and same page: Ibid.
• Immediately after, same work, different page: Ibid., p. 52.
• Later on, after other sources: Calvino, Six Memos, p. 60.

In Italian theses you will also see Ivi (same work, different page) and cit. in the short form. If your department uses author-date style instead (APA and similar, common in economics, psychology and the sciences), sources are cited in brackets in the text and footnotes are only for comments. Either way, every work you cite also goes in the bibliography.

The options are in the footnote dialog: References → the small arrow at the bottom right of the Footnotes group.

• Numbering → Restart each section: notes start again from 1 in each chapter, if each chapter is a section (in our Word template it already is).
• Endnotes: instead of at the bottom of the page, all notes go at the end of the chapter or thesis. Theses rarely use them: readers have to flip back and forth.
• Convert: turns endnotes into footnotes, or the other way round, all at once.

A long note can continue onto the next page: Word splits it by itself with a separator line. That is normal and it prints that way.