Why have nonfiction authors recently started saturating their books with footnotes? I have noticed it in several books I have recently purchased. This is a particularly egregious example.
I guess to appease all the fetishists, too bad there's nothing for all of us non-footfags
>>24983187Academia trains you to reference every single thing you write, so you end up with that bad habit of having to explain everything.
Who cares. Where are my pitnotes?
>>24983187it's just proof that people are becoming dumb. footnotes are what you resort to when you can't write
>>24983187Footnotes and endnotes can be hugely valuable...but if anything, you understate how horribly the book in your pic abuses themFor example, footnote 21 is poorly-used as a justification for the book's statement, and in any case, mere quotation of a passage without further commentary should be relegated to an endnote; something like>21. Hobbes, The Citizen, I.15. See endnote p. xxxOr to truncate it further, the author could indicate in the introduction that he would use the convention of appending the endnote page where he provides the quote simply as [p. xxx] or just the page number, or...whateverTaking up 70% of multiple pages with footnotes borders on self-parody
>>24983187I once read it counts to the minimum word count. So you can pepper in a lot of them which is much easier.
>>24983187Terry Pratchett and DFW did it in a funny way so why not let others do it?
