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The amount of abstraction a writer can get away with depends on the expertise of his readership. But divining the chunks that have been mastered by a typical reader requires a gift of clairvoyance with which few of us are blessed.

 

[…]

 

They are not trying to bamboozle their readers; it’s just the way they think. The specialists are no longer thinking—and thus no longer writing—about tangible objects, and instead are referring to them by the role those objects play in their daily travails.

 

A psychologist calls the labels true and false "assessment words" because that’s why he put them there—so that the participants in the experiment could assess whether it applied to the preceding sentence. Unfortunately, he left it up to us to figure out what an "assessment word" is.

The amount of abstraction a writer can get away with depends on the expertise of his readership. But divining the chunks that have been mastered by a typical reader requires a gift of clairvoyance with which few of us are blessed.

[…]

They are not trying to bamboozle their readers; it’s just the way they think. The specialists are no longer thinking—and thus no longer writing—about tangible objects, and instead are referring to them by the role those objects play in their daily travails.

A psychologist calls the labels true and false "assessment words" because that’s why he put them there—so that the participants in the experiment could assess whether it applied to the preceding sentence. Unfortunately, he left it up to us to figure out what an "assessment word" is.

(Edit: Made this answer some 20% shorter; the first revision was even longer. Needs more work to make it shorter still….)

Let me just mention some points from two articles on this topic, with a request for more such sources:

• Steven Pinker, Why Academics Stink at Writing, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 26, 2014. (Link (paywalled), but you can download it here.)
• George Gopen and Judith Swan, The Science of Scientific Writing, American Scientist, November–December 1990.

(This turned out to be a long answer, so you can skim through it and look for the Explanation [n] points in bold.)

Firstly, bad academic writing is a reality, in some fields more than others. See:

• Dennis Dutton, The Bad Writing Contest: 1996–1998 for examples, and
• Dennis Dutton, Language Crimes: A Lesson in How Not to Write, Courtesy of the Professoriate, The Wall Street Journal, February 5, 1999 for his article about it.

So we have Explanation 1: there are no doubt certain fields, and certain academics, in whose case the bad writing is intentional: to bamboozle the readers, or as "emperor's clothing". (In the example given here, I think this cannot be discounted.) But having recognized that, we can move on to the more interesting cases, when the obscurity is unintended.

Then Pinker considers Explanation 2: academics' "self-serving" one, that there is inherent complexity in what is being discussed, so difficult writing is unavoidable. This is again true to some extent (every field has its jargon), but it is not a complete explanation. Even expert readers are baffled by articles from their own sub-sub-subfield. Pinker gives this example:

which he considers "not as concise, accurate, or scientific as the plain English translation":

Then he mentions an Explanation 3: gatekeepers of journals expect difficult language. This is not true: every field has some papers that are well-written.

Instead, Pinker comes up with three other explanations.

The first of these is based on a theory of different "styles" of writing, in terms of what kind of conversation authors imagine themselves to be having with their readers. Instead of writing in "classic style" (writing as presentation, for directing the reader's gaze towards the truth, successful when clear and simple), academic writing is often in a blend of two styles: a "practical style" (writing in a fixed template, for satisfying a reader's need for a particular kind of information) and "self-conscious style". This is Explanation 4, but it needs a bit of elaboration on what this "self-conscious style" is, and how it manifests.

In self-conscious style, "the writer's chief, if unstated, concern is to escape being convicted of philosophical naïveté about his own enterprise".

Their goal is not so much communication as self-presentation—an overriding defensiveness against any impression that they may be slacker than their peers in hewing to the norms of the guild.

Pinker considers many common flaws in academic writing to be symptoms of this style, such as:

• Metadiscourse: writing about the writing itself, like:

The preceding discussion introduced the problem of academese, summarized the principle theories, and suggested a new analysis based on a theory of Turner and Thomas. The rest of this article is organized as follows. The first section consists of a review of the major shortcomings of academic prose. …

This is very common in academic writing in my experience: the writer thinks it will help the reader, and sometimes it might. Still, Pinker suggests that good style keeps it to a minimum.

He gives these contrasts:

The preceding paragraph demonstrated that parents sometimes give a boy’s name to a girl, but never vice versa.

could be

As we have seen, parents sometimes give a boy’s name to a girl, but never vice versa.

and

The previous section analyzed the source of word sounds. This section raises the question of word meanings.

could be

Now that we have explored the source of word sounds, we arrive at the puzzle of word meanings.

(Regardless of the broader point of whether authors are thinking/writing in classic style or self-conscious style, it seems to me that this habit of metadiscourse is something one can easily pick up from other academic writing. A partial antidote is to keep the reader in mind and imagine having an conversation with them.)

• "Professional narcissism": talking about the world of their profession, rather than about the world of the things they're studying.

Instead of writing

All children acquire the ability to speak a language without explicit lessons. How do they accomplish this feat?

an academic may write

In recent years, an increasing number of psychologists and linguists have turned their attention to the problem of child language acquisition. In this article, recent research on this process will be reviewed.

even though "few people are interested in how professors spend their time". But it is easy for academics to fall into the trap of describing the latter, because they do inhabit that world (and so do many of their readers).

Some other consequences of this self-conscious style he lists, that I'm skipping over: what he calls "apologizing" (claiming how complicated/controversial their topic is), shudder quotes, hedging. The last consequence is interesting, common in academia, and relevant to this question:

• metaconcepts and nominalizations: academics really do bucket their ideas using certain abstractions, but forget to unpack them for the reader. Plus, English makes it easy to make nouns out of verbs: instead of postponing something you can implement its postponement, and so on. The example from Explanation 2 above has many instances of this, as does this:

Prevention of neurogenesis diminished social avoidance.

to mean

When we prevented neurogenesis, the mice no longer avoided other mice.

The point is that the authors may in fact be thinking in the former terms and categories, and fail to write in "classic style" for the reader from the reader's point of view. This leads nicely to:

Explanation 5: the Curse of Knowledge. This is simply the observation that once you know something, it is hard for you to imagine what it is like for someone else to not know it. (See also: false consensus, illusory transparency, etc.)

This is actually subtle: jargon is sometimes inevitable/better and sometimes avoidable; abbreviations that you personally use frequently can become second-nature to you while remaining opaque to readers (even your colleagues).

For more on why authors fail to think like their readers, you can read Pinker, who mentions "chunking" and "functional fixity" (jargon, but he explains them).

The amount of abstraction a writer can get away with depends on the expertise of his readership. But divining the chunks that have been mastered by a typical reader requires a gift of clairvoyance with which few of us are blessed. When we are apprentices in our chosen specialty, we join a clique in which, it seems to us, everyone else seems to know so much! And they talk among themselves as if their knowledge were conventional wisdom to every educated person. As we settle into the clique, it becomes our universe. We fail to appreciate that it is a tiny bubble in a multiverse of cliques.

A psychologist calls the labels true and false "assessment words" because that’s why he put them there—so that the participants in the experiment could assess whether it applied to the preceding sentence. Unfortunately, he left it up to us to figure out what an "assessment word" is. In the same way, a tap on the wrist became a "stimulus," and a tap on the elbow became a "poststimulus event," because the writers cared about the fact that one event came after the other and no longer cared that the events were taps on the arm. But we readers care, because otherwise we have no idea what really took place.

Finally, there is Explanation 6: academics simply have few (or no) incentives for writing well. Clarity requires practice, showing drafts to readers, and a toolbox of skills. This is a lot of work and the profession does not reward it (directly, at least). (And there may even be some incentives against writing well, along the lines of the recent article on perverse incentives in academia.)

Before turning to the other article, let me mention a couple of things from the articles included in the same download. In Helen Sword's Inoculating Against Jargonitis, she reminds us of George Orwell's made-up example: the classic (from Ecclesiastes 9:11)

“I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favor to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.”

might well be written by an academic author as

“Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.”

She also points out that

Academics turn to jargon for a wide variety of reasons: to display their erudition, to signal membership in a disciplinary community, to demonstrate their mastery of complex concepts, to cut briskly into a continuing scholarly conversation, to push knowledge in new directions, to challenge readers’ thinking, to convey ideas and facts efficiently, to play around with language.

Only some of these are good for the reader, but all of these are incentives academics have.

Similarly, Rachel Corr in Becoming a ‘Stylish’ Writer writes:

Listening to academics, I pick up a different set of concerns: Am I making a convincing case? Have I mentioned everything everyone else has said about this topic and pointed out the ways that they are (sort of) wrong? Do you see how much I’ve read? Have I dropped enough important names? Does my specialized language prove I deserve to be a member of your club? Am I right? At the end, I hear hope disguised as an attitude that asks: Am I smart?

The other article (The Science of Scientific Writing by Gopen & Swan, from 1990!) is even more valuable on the precise ways in which academic (especially scientific) writing is harder to understand than it needs to be. To anyone who wants to improve their writing greatly with minimal effort, this is excellent. But I will skip most of it (as this answer is already very long) and focus on one of its "why" points.

One, authors can forget that readers always interpret:

we can only increase the odds that a large majority of readers will tend to interpret our discourse according to our intentions. Such success will follow from authors becoming more consciously aware of the various reader expectations.

More concretely, G&S point out that readers look for the arrival of the verb, especially immediately after the grammatical subject. Similarly, readers pay attention to what comes at the end of a sentence (the stress position). Consider this example:

The smallest of the URF's (URFA6L), a 207-nucleotide (nt) reading frame overlapping out of phase the NH2-terminal portion of the adenosinetriphosphatase (ATPase) subunit 6 gene has been identified as the animal equivalent of the recently discovered yeast H+-ATPase subunit 8 gene. The functional significance of the other URF's has been, on the contrary, elusive. Recently, however, immunoprecipitation experiments with antibodies to purified, rotenone-sensitive NADH-ubiquinone oxido-reductase [hereafter referred to as respiratory chain NADH dehydrogenase or complex I] from bovine heart, as well as enzyme fractionation studies, have indicated that six human URF's (that is, URF1, URF2, URF3, URF4, URF4L, and URF5, hereafter referred to as ND1, ND2, ND3, ND4, ND4L, and ND5) encode subunits of complex I. This is a large complex that also contains many subunits synthesized in the cytoplasm.

Yes, it has jargon, and yes, it has long sentences. But that is not the whole problem; G&S suggest that one way to rewrite it based on their principles (and depending on the authors' intentions) may be:

It still has all the jargon, but many readers (who understand the terms) are more likely to arrive at the same interpretation as what the author is trying to say.

Similarly readers expect the beginning of the sentence (the "topic position") to provide perspective, linkage, and context. So, G&S say, readers are helped most when sentences consistently start with old information (linkage) and end with emphasis on new information. “In our experience, the misplacement of old and new information turns out to be the No. 1 problem in American professional writing today.” This they explain with (continuing my numbering in this answer) Explanation 7:

The article has many insights especially about structure (of sentences or bigger units), but the above is an important explanation, and you can read the rest of the article for yourself. (If you like it, you may also want to watch this video, accompanied by this handout.)

(Sorry for this long answer. I would need to spend more time on it to figure out how to make it shorter!)

Let me mention some points from two articles on this topic, with a request for more such sources:

• Steven Pinker, Why Academic Writing Stinks, Chronicle of Higher Education, September 26, 2014. (Paywalled link, download link.)
• George Gopen and Judith Swan, The Science of Scientific Writing, American Scientist, November–December 1990.

In the first article, Pinker considers three explanations commonly given, and gives three of his own.

The cynical Explanation 1 is that there are certain fields, and certain academics, in whose case the bad writing is intentional: to bamboozle the readers, or as "emperor's clothing". (For likely examples, see Dennis Dutton's The Bad Writing Contest: 1996–1998 and Language Crimes: A Lesson in How Not to Write, Courtesy of the Professoriate.) Even in the unfathomable example given here, this is a possibility. But having recognized this, we can move to the more interesting cases, where the obscurity is unintentional.

Then Pinker considers Explanation 2, academics’ “self-serving” one: that there is inherent complexity in what is being discussed, and therefore difficult writing is unavoidable. Although this is true to some extent (every field has its jargon), it is not a complete explanation. Even expert readers are baffled by articles from their own sub-sub-subfield. Pinker gives this example:

which he considers "not as concise, accurate, or scientific" as the plain:

He also mentions an Explanation 3: that gatekeepers of journals expect difficult language. This is not true: every field has some papers that are well-written.

Instead, Pinker comes up with three other explanations (which I reproduce here in reverse order).

Explanation 4 is that academics simply have few (or no) incentives for writing well. Clarity requires practice, showing drafts to readers, and a toolbox of skills. This is a lot of work and the profession does not reward it (directly, at least). (And there are even some incentives against writing well, along the lines of the recent article on perverse incentives in academia.)

Explanation 5 is the Curse of Knowledge: once you know something, it becomes hard for you to imagine what it is like for someone else to not know it. (Related terms: “false consensus”, “illusory transparency”, etc.)

For example, jargon and abbreviations that you personally use frequently can become second-nature to you while remaining opaque to readers (even your colleagues). There are names in cognitive psychology for two phenomena that explain why authors fail to think like their readers: “chunking” and “functional fixity” (jargon, but he explains them).

The amount of abstraction a writer can get away with depends on the expertise of his readership. But divining the chunks that have been mastered by a typical reader requires a gift of clairvoyance with which few of us are blessed.

A psychologist calls the labels true and false "assessment words" because that’s why he put them there—so that the participants in the experiment could assess whether it applied to the preceding sentence. Unfortunately, he left it up to us to figure out what an "assessment word" is.

The other explanation from this article (the first and longest one given by Pinker) is based on a theory of different styles of writing, in terms of what kind of conversation authors imagine themselves to be having with their readers. Instead of writing in "classic style" (writing as presentation, for directing the reader's gaze towards the truth, successful when clear and simple), academic writing is often in a blend of two styles: a "practical style" (writing in a fixed template, for satisfying a reader's need for a particular kind of information) and "self-conscious style". This is Explanation 6, but it needs a bit of elaboration on what this "self-conscious style" is, and how it manifests.

In self-conscious style, "the writer's chief, if unstated, concern is to escape being convicted of philosophical naïveté about his own enterprise".

Their goal is not so much communication as self-presentation—an overriding defensiveness against any impression that they may be slacker than their peers in hewing to the norms of the guild.

Pinker considers many common flaws in academic writing to be symptoms of this style: metadiscourse (writing about the writing itself, as in "The preceding paragraph demonstrated…" which could be "As we have seen…"), professional narcissism (talking about the world of their profession, rather than about the world of the things they're studying: "In recent years, an increasing number of psychologists and linguists have…"), apologizing (about how complicated/controversial their topic is), shudder quotes, hedging, and metaconcepts/nominalizations.

This last one is especially interesting: academics really do bucket their ideas using certain abstractions, but forget to unpack them for the reader. Plus, English makes it easy to make nouns out of verbs: instead of postponing something you can implement its postponement, and so on. The example from Explanation 2 above has many instances of this, as does this:

Prevention of neurogenesis diminished social avoidance.

rather than

When we prevented neurogenesis, the mice no longer avoided other mice.

The point is that the authors may actually be thinking in the former terms and categories, and fail to write in "classic style" for the reader from the reader's point of view. I believe this is important enough to count as a separate Explanation 7.

And regardless of whether authors are thinking/writing in classic style or self-conscious style, it seems to me that many of these bad habits are things one can easily pick up from reading other academic writing, which is Explanation 8.

In the articles included in the same download, there is an overlapping explanation (Explanation 9): academics have many reasons for using jargon, and not all of them are good for the reader:

Academics turn to jargon for a wide variety of reasons: to display their erudition, to signal membership in a disciplinary community, to demonstrate their mastery of complex concepts, to cut briskly into a continuing scholarly conversation, to push knowledge in new directions, to challenge readers’ thinking, to convey ideas and facts efficiently, to play around with language. (Helen Sword, Inoculating Against Jargonitis)

The other article (The Science of Scientific Writing by Gopen & Swan) is very valuable on some precise ways in which academic (especially scientific) writing is harder to understand than it needs to be. Its main point is that there are certain structural cues that readers unconsciously use for interpretation, but authors do not always satisfy those expectations. (Some of its points are also in this video, accompanied by this handout.)

For example, they consider the following paragraph:

The smallest of the URF's (URFA6L), a 207-nucleotide (nt) reading frame overlapping out of phase the NH2-terminal portion of the adenosinetriphosphatase (ATPase) subunit 6 gene has been identified as the animal equivalent of the recently discovered yeast H+-ATPase subunit 8 gene. The functional significance of the other URF's has been, on the contrary, elusive. Recently, however, immunoprecipitation experiments with antibodies to purified, rotenone-sensitive NADH-ubiquinone oxido-reductase [hereafter referred to as respiratory chain NADH dehydrogenase or complex I] from bovine heart, as well as enzyme fractionation studies, have indicated that six human URF's (that is, URF1, URF2, URF3, URF4, URF4L, and URF5, hereafter referred to as ND1, ND2, ND3, ND4, ND4L, and ND5) encode subunits of complex I. This is a large complex that also contains many subunits synthesized in the cytoplasm.

If you asked people why it was hard to read, most would mention the technical vocabulary and background knowledge required. These are obviously necessary, so one might consider such paragraphs impossible to improve. However, that is not the whole problem.

At the level of sentences, the article discusses some rough principles:

• In the first sentence above, there are 23 words between the subject ("The smallest") and the verb ("has been identified"). Readers tend to treat what comes between them as an interruption, and pay less attention to it.
• A sentence is expected to make a single point, or serve a single function. It is best if this appears at the end of the sentence (the "stress position").
• At the beginning of sentences (the "topic position", what the sentence is about), the reader expects perspective/linkage and context.
• So, readers are helped most when sentences consistently start with old information (linkage) and end with emphasis on new information. “In our experience, the misplacement of old and new information turns out to be the No. 1 problem in American professional writing today.”

(The above is a crude summary; you can read the article for nuances.)

Based on some of these principles (and with some guesswork about the authors’ intentions), it rewrites the above paragraph to:

This still has all the jargon, but readers who understand it are more likely to arrive at the same interpretation as what the author is trying to say, and more easily.

But many authors consistently violate these principles and do the exact opposite (putting new information first without linkage, and old information at the end where it receives emphasis), for which the article has the following (continuing my numbering in this answer) Explanation 10:

(Edit: Made this answer some 20% shorter; the first revision was even longer. Needs more work to make it shorter still….)