If you're not interested in academics, the following might be fairly boring, but if you are, please continue.

So i went to see another grad student present his paper, and a couple of the profs who were there were debating whether he should use less technical language in order to attract a larger audience. I feel in general that a lot of academics (and social science in particular, as that's what I'm familiar with) unnecessarily uses jargon. I understand if certain words have specific meanings within a discipline and therefore it makes sense to use them, but it seems that a lot of the time the terminology actually obscures the meaning. Like when political science papers talk about 'institutions', what does that mean? there are many examples like that, i feel, when the meaning ofthe term is abstracted away, and often its not clear in a specific instance or paper what specifically they mean. (BTW, this isn't a critic on the specific paper from today, as the author explained what he meant and the limits of his measures and whatnot, just a general peeve that I was reminded of). Especially as someone who is not familiar with a lot of the literature, I feel that a good chunk of my time is taken up just trying to figure out what these people are talking about when they use terms that don't have an obvious meaning (or have many meanings) for the average person. I probably do it too when i write, but i hope not.