[6stringmerc]

Yes and a fellow English scholar openly laughed in the face of our PhD highly credentialed Professor because certain attempts to overly sophisticate or garnish banality isn’t a “style of writing” it’s a foul and wrong and do not do it.

She read the sentence including “…and the data crystallized to show..” and she couldn’t finish he was almost in the floor.

“DATA DOESN’T CRYSTALIZE! Ahahaha crystals crystalize!”

[Al-Khwarizmi]

As an academic, I also don't write like that, but laughing at it sounds like the reaction of a jerk. Writing like that can come from cultural differences (in some cultures they really seem to love flourish) or from being a non-native English speaker and translating common idioms literally, it doesn't necessarily mean that the writer is clueless.

[oasisaimlessly]

It seems surprising that the scholar's studies didn't cover the concept of metaphors.