weeny gripe

I'm reviewing an article for publication in the proceedings of a conference I attend.

oh my bob, the writing is so disorganized. It makes my head hurt. The author refers to these sites that are in Ontario and they talk about them as if everyone knows (of course!) exactly where they are and what they are like. And they use abbreviations without, in some cases, giving an initial reference so we know what they are.

And there's lots of Canuck-centric jargon. I had never heard some of the terms before. I asked a colleague who has worked and lived more places than I if he had ever heard a particular term, and this was the response I got:

O_o

Then I Googled it and it came up on a bunch of Canadian sites. So I don't know if I'll get bashed for being the Ugly American if I point out that not everyone in the world uses the same terminology, eh?

So I don't know. So far the paper seems pretty much a FAIL to me; it feels like it was written in a stream-of-consciousness mode, where the author is all, "Oh, yeah, here's this other thing I thought of. Oh, and here's another problem we had." And while stream-of-consciousness is fine for blogs and such, it's not right for scholarly papers.

The whole thing is just a hot mess, as the cool kids say. (Do they still say that? Or have they moved on to a new phrase?)