Introduction: Against the Elitism of Excessive Scholarship

Abstract

Many studies, especially those of ambitious nature, suffer from excessive annotation and documentation. They exhibit too much scholarship. The social function of such exhibition is to intimidate and thus discourage the uninitiate from publishing, especially ambitious works.¹ Here I wish to discuss this function, explain my displeasure with it, and help the ambitious reader to beat the system by offering a quick and easy method of simulating the scholarly stance.