A very interesting article! Being in academia myself (though admittedly still as a student) and having done some writing for magazines, I can thoroughly relate

A very interesting article! Being in academia myself (though admittedly still as a student) and having done some writing for magazines, I can thoroughly relate to this discussion. Academic writing is all about compressing complex topics and ideas with a long history into as concise a form as possible without losing accuracy. (At least in the natural sciences, where I come from; some people would say otherwise about some humanities, but that is beside the point.) This is why we use technical jargon: it helps us express precisely what we mean in as few words as possible. If you've ever tried explaining something highly scientific to a lay audience, you'll know how tedious it can be if you can't use your technical terms. One of my readers doesn't know a word I used? That's what dictionaries and textbooks are for. I can expect all my readers to already have a sufficient background knowledge to understand what I have written. In academic writing, the greatest sins I can commit are misrepresenting something, omitting something important, or - heaven forbid - not citing somebody correctly (= plagiarizing). When writing for a nonacademic audience, everything changes. Suddenly I can no longer assume any background knowledge on the part of my readers, every word that sounds vaguely technical needs to be explained. Also, my readers really don't care who said xyz or who disagrees with him, they "just want the facts". Oftentimes, they do not understand that nobody actually knows exactly what these "facts" are yet, and that all we have are various hypotheses and theories vying for the upper hand. So how do I as a writer present them with as understandable an overview as possible, while still doing justice to the different points of view? It is a constant balancing act that all too often doesn't have a satisfactory solution. Apart from the question of content, the language I use is quite another issue. As j2kun pointed out, scientists aren't trained to write - at least not in the sense journalists are. Scientists are taught to write for scientists: concisely and accurately. Writing in a way that is easy or pleasant to read is not a criterion. So when they do write for the general public, they need to completely overthrow whatever they have learnt about writing and go with a totally different style. That is not easy. All the time I have to keep in mind that the greatest sins here are a) being uninteresting and b) being unintelligible - even when clarity is bought at the expense of accuracy. So yes, academics can write. It just isn't the type of writing lay audiences appreciate. All in all, a little more patience on both sides of the divide would probably be a good thing.