Mr. Stewart,
Thank you for your assessment. As you can imagine, it is not at all what I'd hoped to hear. In fact, it is so completely at odds with what I thought I was doing in writing the article that I'm going to have go back through the thing and try to figure out what it was that you found so objectionable. Perhaps, if I clarify what I was trying to do, someone can offer suggestions for improvement.
I find your description of the article as "elitist" particularly troubling since I tried very hard to stay clear of any advanced mathematics. For example, in the first article (which describes a robot's path following an arc of a circle), I stuck strictly to high school trigonmetry. In fact, it's a lot quicker to obtain the same results using calculus, but I wanted to keep the material accessible to high school students. Even then, there were places where I worried that I was giving too much explanation, not too little. If you look at equation 4, you'll see that I actually wrote out most of the steps in the algebra, showing where the cosines cancelled and so forth... these are steps that are almost always left out in textbooks (the assumption being that the teacher or professor can always fill in the details). Since my readers would be mostly on their own, I felt it important for me to show the development in detail, even at the risk of appearing pedantic.
And this was my approach throughout both articles. In the second article, which used calculus, I was careful to stick to first-semester stuff. When I took calculus, I was always losing 5-points per problem when I solved an indefinite integral and forgot to write down the integration constant. At first that annoyed me because I assumed that writing down the constant was just a pro-forma exercise. Later, I realized that it was important because that constant was the key to linking the calc to real-world applications. In writing my article, I wanted to give inexperienced readers a hint about what was going on so that, perhaps, they could avoid my rather clueless experiences in freshman calc. So in the second article, when I talk about applying "initial conditions" (which I put in italics for emphasis), I put a lot of work into supplying a context for the term. To someone who's taken differential equations, of course, the term is a wonderful shorthand for all sorts of ideas that might take a whole semester to sink in. Since I figured that some of my readers would not yet have that experience, I wanted to give them what they needed to use the concepts themselves.
So, I guess I have to ask you what was the basis for you complaint. The tone? The explanations? Awkward mathematics? I'm sure there are ways to improve the math. If there are gaps in the explanations, I'll be happy to try to fill them in. And as far as the tone... well, it is a bit dry, mannered, and plodding, but then again, so am I. We all have our crosses to bear.
The thing that should be clear by now is that I didn't just churn out an academic paper, but thought very hard about what my readers would need to be successful with the techniques I presented. Franky, I do not believe that I failed. Clearly, you feel otherwise. When I wrote the article, my thought was that I was building a bridge from some elementary theory to more advanced applications. Now I find that rather than building bridges, I am burning a few. So, then, what's the problem? Tell me and I'll fix it.
Gary