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Originally Posted by lin robinson  I would assume that the author would be clever enough to include all neologisms in the glossary. |
Exactly.
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Originally Posted by lin robinson As far as losing the glorious, but apparently fragile, immersion in the work... so people have been wrong to use footnotes all these years? |
No, Lin, but they ought to realise the consequences of what they're doing.
Footnotes, for instance, give a different feel to a book. When it's done well, and
Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell is a good example of this, it reinforces the conceit of the book, in this case that it was written in the nineteenth century. The "quoted" excerpts used in
Dune also add to the feel of the book as well as imparting information.
In another thread, someone said they hated chapter titles in fiction, but expected them in non-fiction. If the conceit of (part of) a book is that it's non-fiction, you ought to think about using chapter titles; and footnotes and a glossary (and even a bibliography
) for that matter.
If the glossary and/or footnotes are simply thrown in to cover the inability of an author to get information across in the text, this will not help a reader get into the book.