By teaching the forms of writing appropriate to their disciplines, faculty give students the explicit help they need in mastering the various roles they are expected to assume. But since we often hold students to unstated professional criteria, our standards for evaluating writing become a well-kept secret, inaccessible becomes inexplicit, left for students to figure out on their own. Many never do. They know that they cannot assume an idea is taught to students simply because they, the teachers, heard themselves say it. Through writing they help students learn more thoroughly and they teach students how to behave like professionals in their fields.
Academic writing raises the issue of jargon.
This was part of the concern felt by my colleague in sociology. Too often, academic writing is ponderous and pompous, choking the ideas in our scholarly journals. In workshops on writing, faculty inevitably confront jargon, and the important distinction to be made is between technical language that is a mask and technical language that fulfills its purpose as a kind of shorthand among professionals. We do not want to give lessons in jargon. Rather, we want to recognize writers like Lewis Thomas and Hannah Arendt and use them as models.