I really don't see much of this in reading (or writing, hopefully...) papers in astrophysics. The prose is generally dull and impersonal, sure, but it's also si

I really don't see much of this in reading (or writing, hopefully...) papers in astrophysics. The prose is generally dull and impersonal, sure, but it's also simple. Obfuscating your own papers won't buy you anything, because published papers don't count for much unless people cite them. And to do that, they need to know what they are about. Of course, there's always a certain degree of what's known as a "community of practice" in very specialized writing: Words have special meanings and there are customary ways of expression that makes it hard to penetrate for outsiders. But that's not because the writing itself is necessarily bad, it's because you don't know the code it's written in.