>You're not wrong. Most authors of academic papers are not good writers. Perversely, regardless of where they are on the spectrum spanning from good to mediocre

>You're not wrong. Most authors of academic papers are not good writers. Perversely, regardless of where they are on the spectrum spanning from good to mediocre to terrible, writers' output is usually made worse when they know they're writing for an academic context—this is why most of the blog posts you're thinking of, with their informal language, make better papers than the papers themselves. This isn't necessarily the writer's fault at all. I have had reviewers complain that the language in my paper was too informal. I wasn't using slang or something like that. But in so many words, the reviewer wanted _more_ academese. It was the last paper of my grad school career and I was sick of academese. In so many words, I told them to pound sand. That was my only paper to never get published.