[mattkrause]

Some bad writing certainly comes from trying to sound “academic” or “scholarly” but there’s more to it than that.

A lot of research involves lumping and splitting: what underlying properties do these seemingly-different share (or vice versa). For example, reading text is just one possible instantiation of a “visual symbolic channel.” Traffic lights, road signs, gauges and dials, logos, and clocks also carry information the same way. If you want to discuss “reading and reading-like activities”, you may want some kind of umbrella term.

Plus, you may want to contrast them with other ways of sharing information: non-symbolic systems that literally depict the item in question (photos on a picture menu, for example) or using a different sense altogether, like church bells for telling time.