I see it as a long-standing cultural thing. If you try to make the text more friendly and readable you'll be told to fix it by peer-review. There's a very well established formal academic writing style and you have to actively learn how to consume it.

I'm sure there are justifiable reasons for why it evolved that way, but it doesn't make for an easy format for extracting and understanding the underlying ideas if you're not already deeply immersed in that particular corner of academia.

Most papers I read I really want to go to a coffee shop/bar with the author and have a human conversation with them to find out what the paper is about and which bits of it are interesting and novel without putting in hours of additional effort myself!

> Most papers I read I really want to go to a coffee shop/bar with the author and have a human conversation with them to find out what the paper is about and which bits of it are interesting and novel without putting in hours of additional effort myself!

This is why journal clubs were invented. All the fun discussion, none of the inaccessible academic writing.

It's also what I use frontier LLMs for -- prompt with the paper, and then attempt to tear it to shreds while the LLM pushes back against me. By the time the model and I are done, I generally understand the paper far better than if I'd sat down to read it cold. Then I actually read the paper.

All that said, I do feel that you can still write engaging papers in the academia. Some disciplines manage this as the norm -- take a look at some articles in the field of History, and the writing often manages to be rich and eloquent, while still making impeccable arguments with evidence. The greater problem is that a lot of academics in the sciences are just poor writers, and likely studied the sciences because they weren't into arts in the first place and avoided learning how to write well. Sad times.

I see it as something similar to Aviation English:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_English

Scientific papers are often written and read by non-native speakers. A standardized formal style is less likely to embed potentially confusing cultural assumptions.

I’ve had a surprising amount of success by emailing one of the authors of various papers and asking those exact kind of questions (though more specific: I need to show that I have put effort in!)