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In a similar vein, I was recently reading a book by an independent author. It wasn't bad plotting and dialogue, but I finally couldn't take anymore. Every couple of paragraphs the author had to throw in a five dollar word where everyday English would do just fine.
What made it jarring was that the words were often wrong. For example, there was one place where the correct word would have been 'order' to indicate that something was sorted a certain way. The author used precedence instead. While precedence does strictly speaking imply an order, it is usually used to signify that something in an order is higher ranking or came before others. This is the only instance that I explicitly remember, but it was actually on the the more correct examples. It's like the writer thought you had to be 'erudite' to be recognized as a good writer. It appeared they got their words and definitions from a word of the day calendar, and they didn't have any practical experience with using them.
I was torn on what to do. Except for this habit, the book was OK. I'd like to leave feedback on Amazon, but my goal is to encourage the writer to step it up, not to kill their chance at writing. Unfortunately, there is no way to leave a polite note to the writer without it being an open criticism (review) that encourages the public to shun the writer.
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