I think the author conflates aspects of bad writing (which is rife, not only in academic papers, but everywhere), with the increased use of jargon and acronyms. I think jargon and acronyms serve two important purposes in academic writing. They help with conciseness and precision. For people working in the field, long, elaborate descriptions tend to just be noisy, when a more concise term would convey the same information. This can seem like gatekeeping, but in practice, scientific papers are not written for laymen, but for a (typically) rather small amount of other people working on the same, or closely related fields. Writing for dissemination purposes should be more explicit, and maybe avoid some acronyms and very specific jargon, but for scientific writing, please be short, sweet and to the point!<p>The cholera example, for me, shows the opposite of what the author is trying to put forward. The second paper conveys the information much more clearly, and in under half the space.