Academics are smart, highly educated, deeply intellectual people. Yet most of them insist on writing as if they failed Composition 101. Twice.

We’ve all seen it. The philosophy book, the Women and Gender Studies article, even a piece of literary criticism assigned by the English Department—which one would reasonably expect to be a bastion of good writing—that is utterly incomprehensible. You underline, you highlight, you print 10,000 pages worth of mind-numbing density in the ArtSci Lab and you muddle through. But if anyone’s being honest, even your professor probably can’t quite decipher it.

After nearly four years in the ivory tower, I’ve become convinced that the problem is not that undergraduates are dumb. It’s that academics aren’t smart enough.

Bad writing is easy. Admit it, you’ve written a paper in one night that was so padded with strings of excess like “It seems we therefore must conclude after careful examination that the only possible result is,” that the final product is not an essay; it’s a cure for insomnia. But, hey, at least it meets the minimum page requirement!

Still, wordiness is only one part of the problem. Some academics couch their points in so many qualifying statements that their work reveals nothing but their terrible fear of expressing an actual opinion. Statements like “Academic writing is soul-crushing” become “I believe, in my humble view, and of course many other sources disagree, that while some academics write very well, others tend to be in need of some minor improvements.” (The best way to improve that sentence might be to substitute the last two words with “lobotomies.”) It makes me question how many academics have ever described murder as “an incidence in which someone may have been forcibly expired.” The only crime evident in a sentence like that is the one committed against the English language.

And yet the charges do not end there. Academic writers often use jargon and SAT words with such frequency that I want to throw copies of George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language” at them until the only words they know are monosyllabic. (Or at the very least until they stop using words like “monosyllabic.”) Impressively large words have their place, but they obscure meaning more often then they enhance it. Academics also tend to use such words with horrific imprecision, as if they scrolled through a thesaurus until they reached the word with the greatest number of letters. Their high school English teachers would disapprove—and we should too.

The problem is so widespread that I do not think we can fault individual writers exclusively. I sometimes wonder whether tenure is granted according to the number of incomprehensible words evident on one’s curriculum vitae. I have also heard stories of scholars who chose to write terribly for fear that clear English would make their ideas seem too simple to be taken seriously. That is absurd. A healthy academic culture should prize scholarly work that is both well-crafted and well-communicated. Clearer writing would also enable academics to have more influence on real-world policies and actions, a worthy goal that is too often neglected by today’s universities.

The current generation of professors is probably beyond my reach, but to my fellow students who intend to pursue a Ph.D., please—for your own sake as much as for undergrads everywhere—write like the intellectuals you are.