I don’t think poor academic writing should be able to hide behind the excuse of ‘that’s how they expect it to be’ (in academia), simply because there exists so much well-written, clear, cogent writing from highly respected members in the academic base. I do not mean to say that the more… ‘difficult’ style is not accepted by academia, because it is; most people are willing (unfortunately) to deal with hard-to-read papers to get at the ideas contained within. But this creates the unfortunate situation that people who have poor writing/communication skills never feel the pressure to improve them, nor is there a need to enliven their writing. Really, if they were to do so, I think everyone would be more than happy to accept the change as it’s already a relief to pick up an article and find it well-written. I’d replace the word ‘meant’ in meemorize’s first sentence to ‘allowed’, actually.
The other main issue I’m seeing here is that concision is prized in the academic world. On a personal level, I always try to keep my papers interesting and flowing in a narrative style. However, because of this I’m terribly wordy; one paper a semester will actually be within the page limit’s upper end (at least on the first draft). So, if you’re trying to squeeze in all these thoughts into the shortest space possible (important for the professional academic, less important for those undergrads trying to reach the word count!), you’ll produce this unfortunately dense style.
But that’s not always an issue; many people are able to take the space they need, and really, many of them just are poor writers. Interestingly, I find more British papers to be well-written than American ones; I don’t think standards of writing are taught as well in my home country, or they may simply be more tolerant of stuffy prose (ironically enough, given that the Brits practically invented ivory-tower academia). meemorize’s comment about not being marked down for causal writing in an academic context is an interesting one, too, in this context, because it really does show that academia does not demand the formal stuff; we’d all be just as willing to read clear, even (dare I say it) entertaining articles—so long as the arguments remained solid underneath, which is, of course, the key. And yes, bad prose can in fact obscure those! There are a lot of bad writers out there who become respected in academia, unfortunately…
I realize that this post is probably in the category of awful, incoherent writing, so I’m sorry; it’s been a late week after the election, and the brain isn’t actually running so well right now