I've found that even academics who are actually quite good at writing for popular venues still fall into typically academic patterns (like the overuse of passiv

I've found that even academics who are actually quite good at writing for popular venues still fall into typically academic patterns (like the overuse of passive voice or jargon) in their journal articles. I blame it on peer review more than anything else - my experience with the peer review process (n=6) has been that unorthodox turns of phrase or narrative quirks are often the first things to get flagged. Peer review has a necessary and obvious function, but it also has a side effect of smoothing out prose style. The result is that journal articles (even in those in single-author fields) often sound like they were written by a hive mind rather than an individual. I was actually intending to do graduate work in archaeology but switched to history when I realized how dreary the prose style favored by archaeologists was. At least history has a few authors with an engaging and original style (for instance, Simon Schama, Fernand Braudel, and Natalie Zemon Davis). To be fair, archaeology has some interesting prose writers of its own (Colin Renfrew, Marija Gimbutas) but the ordinary journal article style tends to be a morass of passive voice and clichéd phrasing.