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Building off what you're saying here, one important facet to academic writing not covered by the article is the concept of specificity. For most fields jargon i

Building off what you're saying here, one important facet to academic writing not covered by the article is the concept of specificity. For most fields jargon is crafted to map single words/phrases to single concepts. In this way a 16 page article becomes an 8 page article at the expense of losing anyone that isn't already familiar with the mapping (or worse causing misunderstandings when jargon shares a word but doesn't match the accepted vernacular). Unfortunately, because of the stranglehold journalistic publications have on the dissemination of scientific work, there is little incentive to change styles or provide the tools for the non-specialist to consume the information because the general public will never have the opportunity to.

nmrm2 11y ago
> because of the stranglehold journalistic publications have on the dissemination of scientific work... But they don't. There are media for longer form presentations of ideas -- dissertations, books, and lecture notes (a.k.a. early drafts of books) come to mind. Each of these is de facto mandatory for a successful academic career in science. A lot of academics also publish blogs, documented software packages, etc. The complaints about jargon in journal articles and conference proceedings from non-scientists or from scientists talking about an area other than their own come across, to me, as kind of self-centered. Sometimes laypeople (or even scientifically literate generalists) aren't the target audience of a text. That doesn't mean there's some big problem with the world. If I had a dime for every time someone who's never taken a non-intro science course complained about not understanding a scientific publication...