academic writing is deeply frustrating to read. i get that the point is more about rigor than accessibility but i think you can and should have both. a lot of cool ideas are only described in one or two papers, and i'd like to learn about them, but my eyes just slide off the page
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in reply to @ysaie's post:
i have seen some that make the effort to be accessible and once you see it you realize how obtuse other papers are
sometimes they are forced into it, like instead of explaining a thing they have to just use some obscure technical term or formula because of arbitrary page or word limits, other times it is just to make themselves feel smarter
there are a few papers that are so dense that it takes years before other academics even bother with it
there was one math paper which basically created its own system from scratch and claimed to solve some big problem but it was so long and convoluted that last i heard no one had figured out if the author had actually solved the problem or not
haha, i think i've seen snippets of that math one you're talking about! i am definitely calling out math in particular for encoding really elegant ideas into dense pictograms that mean nothing without an accompanying paragraph or two of explainer, and then omitting the explainer as "obvious"
the really frustrating thing about "math is a universal language" is that there are all these dialects!
different authors or adjacent hyper-specific fields of study will use the same symbols to mean different things or different symbols to mean the same thing
i have had to create my own glossary with my own rules and logic for how i want to write things based on the papers i read, but also include the alternatives so i have some hope of decoding other dialects
it is wild out there!
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