Stripping Parenthetical Citations into Notes

In some documents you may decide that source citations should appear in footnotes or endnotes rather than in parentheses in the document’s body text. In that case, you can use NoteStripper to strip out the parenthetical citations and turn them into Word’s embedded, automatically renumbering footnotes or endnotes.

To do so:

1. Click the NoteStripper menu at the top of your Word screen.

2. Click “Parenthetical Text to Notes.”

The program will ask you to choose the type of notes you want to convert:

1. Footnotes.

2. Endnotes.

Click the option you want, then click “OK.”

Next, the program will ask you to choose the type of entries you want to convert:

1. All entries.

2. Individual entries.

Click the option you want, then click “OK.”

If you select “Individual entries,” the program will find each occurrence of parenthetical text and present you with several options:

1. Convert the current entry.

2. Go to the next entry, leaving the current entry untouched.

3. Undo the previous conversion.

4. Convert all remaining entries from the cursor position to the end of the document.

5. Cancel the program at the current cursor position.

Converting entries individually takes longer than having the program do them all automatically, but it allows you to preserve parenthetical text that should not be turned into a note. If you’re certain that everything in parentheses should be turned into a note, click “All entries.”

If you have only a few places where parentheses should be preserved, and you know where they are, you could manually change them into something like three “at” signs: @@@. Then you could have NoteStripper automatically convert the other parenthetical citations. Finally, you could go back and change all occurrences of three “at” signs into the proper parentheses.