[pavon]

I like the "grandmothering" practice. Subfields are becoming more and more specialized. As a practitioner and not a researcher, it is not uncommon for me to be unfamiliar with half of the terminology in a paper because it is different from how things are described in my subfield, but once I look it all up, the concepts are pretty clear (and often similar to things I already knew under different names). Having a couple sentences at the beginning to describe in plain english what the context of this paper is, helps me figure out whether it is applicable to what I'm looking for, and identifies the major keywords that I can use to find a primer to get up to speed to understanding the rest.

For those who are active researchers in the field, having to skim a couple sentences before getting to the meat of the paper isn't a big deal.