Most of my family are lawyers! My intuition is that the quality of writing in the texts that lawyers read is far higher than the average scientific paper, which

Most of my family are lawyers! My intuition is that the quality of writing in the texts that lawyers read is far higher than the average scientific paper, which is after all not valued for its prose, but for its findings. On the other hand, I get the feeling that in some jurisdictions the standard of evidence in courts is far lower than er... than what it's supposed to be in the sciences (but it really isn't). Anyway for me it makes sense that more persuasive language is used in your occupation than in mine. It's not that researchers don't need to structure arguments carefully, it's just that we got formulae and experiments and formal proofs, so we don't really need to argue so much. In any case, most people start reading a paper by looking for the figures... I should say that I spent my childhood thinking I would grow up to be a professional writer. I kind of did, I just didn't think I'd be writing research papers. The errors of imprecision I committed in my rejected papers (mentioned in my OP above) were the result of my habbit of thinking about writing in the way that a creative writer thinks, where the goal is beauty, not precision. I really saw a huge difference in the way my papers were received when I corrected for that. I went from having my papers rejected with angry notes, to being complimented for their clarity and my first published paper even got a Best Student Paper award. The change I made was literally just consistent use of terminology. It was like throwing a switch! I was so surprised. Hence my disagreement with McCarthy on that one particular point. I think his other points are fair, btw.