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Investigating the Complexity of Academic Writing (theatlantic.com)
biohack writes: While the general public might expect that researchers should want to maximize comprehension of their work, academic writing tends to follow an opaque style permeated with professional jargon and complex syntax. Proposed explanations for the emergence of this style range from experts generally finding it difficult to be simple when writing about their expertise to more complex social and cultural theories: "Cynics charge ... that academics play an elitist game with their words: They want to exclude interlopers. Others say that academics have traditionally been forced to write in an opaque style to be taken seriously by the gatekeepers—academic journal editors, for example."
Well no shit.
1. Writing well is hard. These are people who have devoted their lives to science not writing. Expecting them to be good at both is common, but silly.
2. Jargon gets a bad rap, unecessarily so. Yes it makes it harder for outsiders, but with it aids communication because you don't have to have long winded and inaccurate descriptions of commonly used things every time.
For example, I can talk about corner detection and most people in computer vision would immediately know what I'm talking about wit hme using only two words. Space is imited, and verbosity is also harmful.
3. Many many scientists do not have English as a first language, yet it is the language of almost all journals of any repute.
4. Deadlines These things happen.
5. No one pays them to write better. Your job security is based on the amount of science done. If scientists put more time into writing and less into doing science then they risk falling behind and losing a job in a brutally competitie market.
So: if you want scientists to write better, you have to allocate money for it.
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For theoretical physics I think it is hopeless. There are just too man concepts that would take too long to introduce. I'm a PhD physicist and I can't read theoretical physics papers - not the jargon, but I'm just not comfortable with the concepts. Just try explaining a HIggs boson to a non-physicist - and that is a decades old concept. Strings are hopeless, but they are just the basics needed for modern physics.
Other subjects are probably similar.
And when they're thinking about their work, they think in terms of jargon. Just like how a veteran coder is going to think programatically.
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