When you know more than the knitting book author

I have this old stitchery book that my MIL gave me when she left my FIL and moved to Idaho. It has stitch patterns and instructions for knit, crochet, macrame, embroidery, and sewing all in one giant book. It has illustrations of the patterns rather than actual pictures, but that doesn't bother me so much. This is the same book that I was desperately looking for a correction to the drooping elm leaf pattern a few months ago. You'd think that I'd learn....lol

Well, I didn't. I don't own another stitch pattern book, and I was thinking of making a lace head scarf. Maybe to submit as a pattern to one of the online knitting magazines, or just to put on my blog. I found a pattern I like for my first try and I have to wade through the obnoxious instructions. Here's an example:

"For the third row, knit2. Repeat the following procedure. * Knit 1. Then knit two together and put yarn over twice. Knit 1. Follow with yarn over, and knit 2 together through back of loop twice. Knit 1. * End with knit 2."

Ok, let's examine this a bit shall we? First, why on earth can't she just use abbreviations?

! I can then glance at a line and tell what I need to do rather than read have to read the entire thing to figure out what's going on. Second, her punctuation confuses me. Does "Knit two together and put yarn over twice" mean K2tog, yo, yo? or (K2tog, yo) twice? I had to actually count the number of stitches you're using to figure it out. It is the second one. Grr.

All of this is probably just the author's style. Frustrating, but decypherable. What gets me is that I've been knitting pretty consistently for a little over 6 months now learning about lace, and cables, etc, and I really think that I just might know more about knitting than the author does. That's just sad. I noticed that half of her decreases in the pattern (both on the right side and the wrong side) are simply k2tog through back loop. This will twist the stitches. Do I want the stitches twisted? Does she know that if I twist half the decreases and not the other half that they won't match? Has she never heard of SSK, or SKP? Now that I've spent an hour rewriting the pattern, I'm going to attempt it both ways. Once with twisted stitches, once without. We shall see who is the better lace knitter, me (who has only knit like 2 lace projects) or the author.