I think jargon is a bit of a scapegoat. Documentation and writing about technical topics has roughly the same risk; I think we've all seen sentences or paragrap

I think jargon is a bit of a scapegoat. Documentation and writing about technical topics has roughly the same risk; I think we've all seen sentences or paragraphs that are entirely impenetrable if you don't know the terminology and technology under discussion. Much of this writing could also be simplified and made approachable, but unpacking all of the jargon all of the time is an impractical burden on writing not meant for general consumption. It's probably also worth noting that there are rarely-discussed personal and professional risks to making your scholarship too "accessible" if it's the sort of thing people outside of your field or outside of the academy altogether are even a little likely to find controversial enough to harass you over. That said, I think much could be done to improve the situation by encouraging journals, academic presses, awards and other mechanisms of scholarship review to: 1. Establish pragmatic readability standards describing roughly who should find accepted articles readable, with or without a given condensed reference. 2. Where needed, develop and maintain condensed references (perhaps in conjunction with other institutions in the field) which provide enough background and terminology to meet the readability goal. One example might be "to be accepted, your submission should be rated as readable with the aid of our condensed reference by a small sample of undergraduates in your specialty, masters students in your department, and doctoral candidates within your college." Even fairly permissive standards (i.e., just PhD candidates in your specialty) of this sort would guide most academics towards being much more conscious of how approachable their writing is.