I need to remove a large para marker above the first footnote of every page, yet even by showing all hidden symbols, Word does not allow my cursor to touch this particular marker. And in draft view the footer is not visible. This para marker has sneaked its way to sit above the first footnote on every page of this 100+ page document.

Tried searching for the solution online without success. What is the way to remove this unwanted para marker?

All footers will have a paragraph mark because all contain, by design, at least one paragraph. Every page has a footer.

You can modify the Footer style's font size.
You can select the paragraph mark and change its Font size to 1 (type it).

I refer to a new paragraph marker that was not there before, and which has pushed the line separator between the footer and the general text upward by a centimeter. It is, I believe, not the mark to which you refer but rather one that is not supposed to be there and needs to be removed.

Footer or Footnote?

Paragraph breaks appear in headers and/or footers once you add content to any of the document's headers or footers, as the case may be. They're still there otherwise but aren't visible when you have Word's formatting display switched on until at least one is populated.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

My apologies. Thank you for asking. I shall fix the thread title as well as the description in the first post. This thread is about a paragraph marker that has made its way in between the first footnote and the line separator which separates the footnotes from the general text of the page. On pages on which there is no footnote, all the formatting is perfect. On pages on which there are footnotes, there is a large paragraph marker which raises up the line separator, and even when I show all the paragraph markers, Word does not allow me to bring my curser to this paragraph marker and delete it.

The footers are fine. There is no problem with the footers.

So, this is what you are talking about:

What that indicates is that you've added an extra paragraph break to the footnote separator. To access that, switch to Draft view, then choose:
References>Show Notes>Footnotes:Footnote Separator
then delete all paragraph breaks till you're left with just one - which can't be deleted.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Perfect! Worked like a charm. Thank you!!!

(I am just curious as to how one does a thing i.e. how does one "add an extra paragraph break to the footnote separator"? I don't think I could do that if I tried. It happened when my colleague was working with the file, and I would be quite interested to understand so I can explain to him how to avoid doing so in the future.)

Your colleague most likely accessed the Footnote Separator as described above and pressed the <Enter> key.

__________________
Cheers,
Paul Edstein
[Fmr MS MVP - Word]

Ok, many thanks. I would be surprised if that happened, as he only works in Print layout mode. But I suppose inadvertently something like that could have happened. Anyhow now it is fixed, and we know how to fix it in the future as well. That is the main thing.