It’s that empty paragraph that annoys a lot of people - it just adds unwanted space in front of the page’s footnotes, when there’s already a visual separator in the partial line. The footnote separator line and the empty paragraph are styled as ‘Normal’, so if you’ve adjusted the paragraph spacing (leading) above and/or below in the style, you may get way more space than you need, as shown in the screenshot below. When you insert a footnote in Word ( References tab > Insert Footnote), by default it gets added to the bottom of the page along with a short line and an empty paragraph to separate it from the body of the text.
