Sound reasons for excluding a reviewer I am about to submit a paper, and I'm asked whether I want anybody to be excluded from consideration as a reviewer. I also need to state a reason. I briefly considered listing someone who - I have reasons to believe - once reviewed a paper of mine by listing criticisms that were unspecific enough that I spent a very large amount of time just trying to figure out what they meant. Of course my guess could be wrong, and it seems unfair to label someone as a suboptimal reviewer based on a hunch. Which led me to wonder - what are some good reasons for asking for exclusion of a reviewer? And additionally, what would polite wordings be for each of these reasons?
You should list reviewers (if any) that you think may be unfairly biased towards your science in some specific way. this includes persons with whom there may be a personal conflict that would shadow an objective review or people who have shown an unmitigated dislike for your science or the like. It is not intended to be used to list persons just because they may not agree with your science. In the specific case you list, I can see that such a reviewer may be unwanted but I do not think the reasons are strong enough to warrant signalling the reviewer as unwanted. The chances of the reviewer being asked may be small if there are many others that can be considered useful. Finally, if you were still to receive a review that is as unclear as the one you describe, you should ask the editor to clarify what you should read out from the review. After all, the editor must have read the review and used it to evaluate the degree of revisions necessary of your manuscript. So in short, you should save the nasty for listing as unwanted or non-preferred (whatever the journal terminology may be) reviewer.