Many papers are just badly written. I've lost count of the number of times I've been reading formula when the author suddenly starts using terms that are not de

Many papers are just badly written. I've lost count of the number of times I've been reading formula when the author suddenly starts using terms that are not defined in the paper. Okay, if you're reading a physics paper and you encounter 'c', that's probably the speed of light, 'm' is likely mass, and so on. There's context and culture involved, and that's usually fine. But if you're wading through something less mainstream, say some denotational semantics or queuing theory, and the author starts dragging in undefined alphabet soup, what's the reader supposed to do? Sometimes the answer is to get more culture in the subject area, or read some of the same author's previous papers, or just forge ahead in the paper and hope that understanding will come anyway. Don't get me started on formula that use single character variables nearly everywhere, but have zingers like 'hz' -- which is not 'h' times 'z', but Hertz. If math is supposed to be so rigorous, how come there's no agreed upon grammar, with reasonable ways to extend it to specialized domains?