In keeping with [author Mark] McGurl’s love of systems, diagrams dot The Program Era, a feature that some early reviewers have found off-putting. Charles McGrath did some eye-rolling in an early, unkind review for The New York Times in which he likened writing programs to Ponzi schemes and chastised McGurl for cluttering his prose with academic jargon — which hardly seems fair, given that The Program Era is a scholarly book, published by a university press and intended for an academic audience.
So if a book’s intended for an academic audience, it’s supposed to have prose cluttered with academic jargon?