This paper and what's wrong with it

[gryphonsegg]

I'm expected to read nine papers, four of which are review papers (that means they're extra long) by Monday afternoon. I got through two of them okay, but then I hit the third one-- ARGH! It's so badly written I want to scream! First of all, it's full of Block Paragraphs of Doom. It has overly complicated diagrams which are accompanied not by captions but by additional Block Paragraphs of Doom inside inset boxes. The mathematical model is all algebra, the kind of thing I could work out myself with paper and pencil if I had enough time and enough patience, but the variable designations are the most confusing I've ever seen. The variables have four subscripts each, and every one of the four subscripts represents something different, so V1312 and V1213 are different parts of the equation, not to be confused with X1312 and X1213 or B1312 and B1213. Then the authors try to make things look neater by rewriting a long term full of B's and X's as a single delta term, which means that delta stands for something completely unlike and unrelated to what it normally stands for every other time it gets used. All the variables and subscripts are explained in a Block Paragraph of Doom that takes up more than half a page. Somehow this thing got published, which means that multiple people who did not write it had to read it and say it was okay. There is nothing okay about it. I want to break open a pot of red ink on it.