Many academic papers could be half as long—or less. But we write them to be self-contained and accessible to a broad scholarly audience, so we repeat background, define well-known terms, pad the argument just to be safe. And then publishers restrict the number of footnotes.
In an ideal world, a paper would be short, dense, even cryptic—and followed by a massive apparatus of notes explaining context, terminology, prior work, alternatives. Instead, we do the opposite: long main text, minimal notes
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