Dude, This Book Blows

I feel like Ramage writes in a needlessly complicated and esoteric style merely to sound smart. I'll bet he's real satisfied at what a wonderfully intelligent treatise he's written that no one who doesn't pen books on rhetoric will ever fully grasp. Maybe he thinks he's writing "rhetorically" by being so longwinded, wordy, and yet still vague, and hence his whole book is deliciously ironic. If that's the case, I question the point of a text book designed to educate people that's hard for those people to understand. At times, though, I think Ramage keeps on writing just because he can. Or maybe cause he doesn't know how to stop. Or maybe he got paid by the word, so he drew it out as much as possible, just like I am with this paragraph (except I'm not getting paid for it). Whatever. Seriously though, has no one at Pearson Longman Publishing ever heard of judicious editing?

Ramage takes 9 pages to introduce what we'll do "for the rest of the chapter," which is to help us learn how to accurately create a "gist" of anyone or anything. How cute is it that it takes him so long to get to the gist of a chapter about gists? Bad form, Ramage. Introductions should be short and to the point. Incidentally, I'm not sure what the "gist" of what I'm supposed to take away from this chapter is.

I don't find Ramage's ideas about identity to be all that unique or new. Yeah, a lot of people have identities that are manufactured by someone else; perhaps from the culture as a whole, which is driven by advertising and consumerism. Yeah, people who take on the consumerist identity or the corporate identity are kind of phony, and yeah, people who buy into concepts like the clichéd "rugged individualist" should maybe get a bit more in touch with reality. And, yeah, people are often unaware of their identity and how they may have come by it. And hey, language is important! None of this is new or particularly interesting to me. Maybe if there was more stuff about beer and motorcycles...

This book really gives too much information. In between all the clever anecdotes and the long form prose, it's difficult to know what to really focus on, and I think that hurts the book's clarity. If it's going to be written that way, a summary at the end of each chapter would certainly help the reader to know which ideas and concepts are key and should be kept in mind for the rest of the book. A summary would also help to reiterate the author's main points... points that I've been unable to figure out thus far... Yeah, that's probably 250 words. Later, folks...