Annoying Ways Kyle Stedman tells people what they're thinking

So I'm not sure what the point of this is. It seems to be A) Kyle knows everything, and you do not or B) Kyle is an annoying, pretentious git. Because this is less a useful bit on using quotations well, and more of a lecture from that relative who knows everything about everything and will happily tell you whether you want to or not.

(One wonders if Uncle Barry's droning is a defense mechanism against Kyle's superiority. By the end of this essay, I felt a great deal of empathy for Uncle Barry.)

Kyle really, really wants to tell us that his way is best way, but he knows that will annoy people, so he retreats from the theme that is embedded throughout his essay. For example:

Because I’m not here to tell you rules, decrees, or laws, it makes sense to call my classifications annoyances.

That's a nice idea, but if they're just annoyances, they don't need to be fixed, they need to be recognized as potential annoyances and the writer should then use them with that information in mind. So that these "annoyances" are deliberate choices, not accidental stumbles. It would probably help if his examples of fixes weren't as bad in their own way as the annoyance. For example, his "Armadillo" quote:

We should all be prepared with a backup plan if a zombie invasion occurs. “Unlike its human counterparts, an army of zombies is completely independent of support” (Brooks 155). Preparations should be made in the following areas. . . .

Followed by the "right" way:

We should all be prepared with a backup plan if a zombie invasion occurs. Max Brooks suggests a number of ways to prepare for zombies’ particular traits, though he un- derestimates the ability of humans to survive in harsh environments. For example, he writes, “Unlike its human counterparts, an army of zombies is completely independent of support” (155). His shortsightedness could have a number of consequences. . . .

So let me try something here to illustrate why Kyle gives me such a case of the irrits:

We should all be prepared with a backup plan if a zombie invasion occurs. Max Brooks suggests a number of ways to prepare for zombies’ particular traits, though he un- derestimates the ability of humans to survive in harsh environments. His shortsightedness could have a number of consequences. . . . 

What did I change? I yanked the quote. Because there's a case to be made that by the time the quote is "properly" introduced and described and the reader is eased into it, the quote is now redundant. That's not always the case, but one would assume that a critic of Kyle's stature would care about redundancy as much as the offensiveness of an ill-used quote.

One could spend a lot of time on Kyle not knowing when to split a paragraph. Walls of text are satisfying to the author far more than the reader.

In his Spider-man example, he literally talks about why a thing is bad, and then, in the very next paragraph, tells us how it's not bad, if it's done in a way Kyle likes. This almost perfectly illustrates why the way Kyle wrote this is so awful. It's not written in a way that helps the reader use quotes better, not really. I mean the entire thing is a series of barely-linked paragraphs plopped down in no detectable order (which one is the worst? which one is the least bad? We don't know, Kyle is too busy being smart to tell us. I suppose if we too were smart, we'd know all this as well as Kyle.) It's a list of things Kyle doesn't like. Unless he does.