[hc-taway]

> I would argue that academic writing tends to be pretty poor.

The above-namedropped David Foster Wallace certainly thought so.

Among people who spend their days thinking about language I'm pretty sure academese is considered more of an elaborate, extended shibboleth than an effective communication tool, going beyond merely being sprinkled with jargon and fake-fancy clichés (like, say, business language) so that it serves as an effective gatekeeping tool. Hard(er than it needs to be) to read, hard to correctly write.