I’ve been reading a few academic papers, websites and articles lately. Primarily to get some background for a new team I’ve joined at work.

The topics I’ve been looking at are mostly usability, HCI and ethnography related. It’s been a while since I’ve looked at academic writing, but certainly readability and clarity would not be a strong point (amusing in a paper extolling the virtues of usability).

Why is this always explained away as academic speak? Is it more a case of grant maintenance through obfuscation? It’s a struggle to read something that can at best be described as a bad case of ‘a thesaurus threw up on my homework sir’.