I think it’s valid to criticize academia as a hierarchical institution with a near monopoly on specialized knowledge. It’s not valid to say reading books or using polysyllabic words is bad.
There is a problem among academics in which those who are not particularly capable with the written word seem to think that they can compensate for this fact by writing long overcomplicated sentences instead of a number of short clear sentences. These certain people seem to conflate overwrought linguistic structure with the expression of complex ideas in their attempt to make their language and its content seem impressive. They also tend to use less common words where more common words will do just as well if not better. The point of academic writing is to clearly express the ideas you’re trying to convey. You’re not writing a Thomas Pynchon novel. We shouldn’t have to spend time discerning your meaning. Just directly transfer the content from the page through my eyes into my brain. You should use whatever jargon is particular to your field, but very rarely should the uninitiated be unable to learn from context what the jargon means. If you’re not capable of conveying complex ideas in clear simple sentences and making your point clear to people who have not studied your particular niche, you maybe should do something different because you’re not a very good academic. If we didn’t have so many academics writing so poorly we wouldn’t have so many people criticizing our word choice because they wouldn’t notice our word choice because they would be learning new words instead. Maybe they’d be more inclined to read our books if there weren’t so many of us creating an artificial barrier to entry in order to inflate the import of our content or our language.
