"How 'bout "most' academics"
If you are referring to communication to those outside of their area of specialization the details of what transpires within their area of specialization, maybe.
But try asking people like statisticians, engineers, medicinal chemists, physiologists, semi-conductor scientists, statisticians, or even accountants nowdays, exactly what it is they do in detail; nearly all of these areas have people who work in both academia as well as the "real world". I think you'll often encounter the same problem. That is unless you are fortunate enough to encounter one of the people who has to report to someone who isn't familiar with the field to justify continued funding on exactly what they are doing in the area, as opposed to funding somewhere else.
Do you really want to sit down for a half-hour lecture on complex cellular biochemistry full of words you don't understand, the statistical details of the clinical trial, or just have the doctor (who probably doesn't know many of those things anyway) say what final results suggest, "studies show taking this drug for your condition has the least side-effects like impotence"?
Yet a team of people found that understanding of just that complex cellular biochemistry was required to point them in the direction of producing that drug with fewer side effects, and do efficiently and economically communicate with each other in a language that is to the uninitated an obtuse jargon of acronyms and gobblydegook.
Does the image below impart a lot of information?
Can I tell you what all of the information represented here is? No. Can I tell you what information is here that I recognize in a couple of paragraphs of plain language? No. It represents a condensation of a lot of concepts developed in a long series of steps. This particular representation of those concepts is of practical use to a particular speciality.
If I replace the english letters and numbers with some strange symbols, some people could probably be conviced that it is a representation of something entirely different, or even some kind of "plan" from aliens.
I can tell you,
"It is a two-dimensional representation of one of 230 possible ways that the gemometry of three dimensional space permits a crystal (a three dimensional, regularly-spaced lattice of repeating units) to exist. A lot of the funny symbols and numbers represent things like rotation axes or mirror planes that symmetry allows for the repition of the pattern. It is a representation of what is known as a space-group."
Sorry, that's the best that I can do in a couple of sentences. Don't like it? How about,
"It is a representation of one of the many ways things can stack up to make a crystal, and some geometric properties of that kind of crystal." Simpler, but less informative.
Academic mumbo-jumbo? Hardly. This kind of thing is the basis crystallography, which is a tool used by metalurgists, geologists, chemists, and biochemists. Many of the pictures of how atoms are stacked up in metals, or other solids, as well as the the 3D pictures of things like DNA come from this.
The pix came from
School of Crystallography, Birkbeck College, University of London.
You ought to see what happens when a bunch of mathematicians generalize and expand the concepts that underlie this...
Here is an applied (as opposed to entirely generalized and abstracted)
http://www.ornl.gov/sci/ortep/topology.html] example.
So, I would say:
"...academics live in such an insulated world where they aren't really required to communicate clearly, that they've developed a tradition of communicating little and doing it poorly."
The above quote doesn't apply to most "academics" or most trained in academia who pursue careers in the "real world" regarding communication to others within their field. Quite the opposite in fact. It is merely a different language, meant to handle foreign concepts, that otherwise would require a huge amount of "ordinary" language.
I suspect that if you were to pick up a peer reviewed engineering, pharmaceutical, or solid-state materials journal, the articles produced by those in academia vs those employed by industry,would be for the most part indistinguishable if the authors' location were blacked out.
Their are a few exceptions of course, and even some fields or areas of specialization could be singled out. I think that those few who choose to apply the ideas of "postmodern" literary criticism whole-scale is probably one such exception. I think these exceptions will only or mostly occur in those fields where academia is the only place that the field is pursued.
