Excessive references can also become a strategy to hide a lack of the author’s own arguments and the lack of a real connective thread in his own proposal.
This can all be read between the lines when a paragraph starts by using another person’s name, with a foreign voice, a voice that belongs to someone who has nothing to do with who we are, or with what our writing can be like.
From a reading point of view, a reference placed in the most prominent part of the paragraph is a constant nuisance when it’s reiterated, paragraph after paragraph, through the pages and full works. Our mind, instead of reconstructing special content that require conscious attention, gets distracted with an onomastic geography that assumes more importance than ideas or crucial images.
When we make a correction, we need to ask ourselves: Is this what I was looking for? Is this the most appropriate style to help the public benefit from the text? Do we really want to value more what someone else says, instead of valuing our own ideas more? Does using too many references make it seem like the text is empty, disordered and without an original idea? The answers to these questions determine the way in which the text has to be rewritten, corrected, edited and published. If ethics ruled the selection of work published in college, not a single sheet of paper would be miserably wasted in texts written just to earn points towards an academic grade, getting job positions and enlarging pseudo-academic egos.
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