In our book group this morning, all of us found ourselves wrestling with the tension of reading a work with worthwhile ideas that were elaborated both so densely and extensively that the reading was tedious.  So in a brief post, I will share five of my pet peeves with books:

1.  Authors who make the grasping of their ideas more difficult than need be with dense prose and complicated sentences.  If I can summarize their ideas simply, why can’t they, as the originator do so?

2.  Authors who use unnecessary jargon that may impress those of their own academic guild but leave everyone else thinking “what is s/he saying?”  I secretly wonder whether the members of the guild understand either.

3.  Books that should have been an article, where every chapter after the first is simply the effort to spin out an article length article into book length.

4.  Sidebars or other insertions into the text other than illustrations or figures necessary to the flow of the argument. I find these distract me from the argument.  Maybe that is the point–to distract me from an argument that isn’t very good.  Either that or this is material that seems somehow related but the author couldn’t figure out any other way to incorporate it into his/her argument.

5.  Books that purport to be making a serious argument for a disputed contention that fail to deal with the thoughtful objections to that anyone with a brain in their head would raise.

So those are some of my pet peeves.  What are yours?  To better writing!