The target audience for most academic papers is not the general public and these words or phrases are known to the target audience. If the idea is that academi

The target audience for most academic papers is not the general public and these words or phrases are known to the target audience. If the idea is that academic papers should have a more general audience, then I feel that’s a different statement, because I agree that academic papers are often less accessible to non-target audience members due to word choice. In the case you mentioned there is a bit of redundancy which makes the word “ameliorate” easy to substitute. Terms like “therapeutic” and “misfolding” make it easy to derive that we’re going from a bad to good state. “Activated protein X ameliorates biofilm formation” has more content than if we swapped to “target” in this case, because it has the added effect of indicating that the interaction was “good”. As a continued aside, I think you’d enjoy the talk I originally posted. It dives into the difference between using writing to think vs persuade or educate, and how not recognizing that difference can cause poor scientific communication.