Wolff's other biographies were composed with a certain taut incisiveness; this one, especially in the second half, relaxes into colloquial asides, parentheses, and proliferating footnotes.
With their cozy parentheses and clumsy footnotes, their careening mixture of Jewish vaudeville humor and Buddhist prescription, they betray a loss of creative discipline, a surrender to cherished mannerisms".
The sound of the man's narration may be represented by vocabulary, syntax, imagery, graphic devices of various sorts quotation marks, punctuation, line breaks, visual patterning of white space and black space, markers that encode print analogs to speech vernacular interjections, parentheses, ellipses, asterisks, footnotes, italics, dashes ..
It is not surprising that the most telling details in this biography of Jimmy Stewart, who so profoundly embodied both the tormented and the tormentor, appear in footnotes and between parentheses, as if in the books unconscious.
Editors will often recommend that any information included in parentheses in a piece of academic writing be footnoted instead.
If your instructor has stated that you should not use footnotes or endnotes, provide the same citation information in parentheses immediately following the borrowed information and before the closing punctuation.
One of the lecturers, an engineer, questioned why lawyers write their papers with footnotes, while engineers always give formulas and other items in parentheses.
In my mind, footnotes are simply another punctuative style: a subspecies of parenthesis that tells the reader: "I've got something else here you might like!
