The result, often even in the humanities, is that scholars communicate in a needlessly opaque jargon decipherable only to those who have mastered the code of the club. It's the equivalent of a secret handshake. Most academics welcome efforts to make their prose more accessible. Some, however, suspect that to translate Academese into standard English is to dumb it down. A few genuinely seem to prefer obscurity and to confuse it with profundity.
Editors have a self-effacing vocation.
Theirs is a hidden glory. My colleague Richard John Neuhaus tells my favorite editor story. The distinguished scholar was, unfortunately, not much of a stylist. RJN labored at considerable length to bring order and clarity to the ungainly manuscript. When, some weeks later, the article was published, the distinguished scholar remarked to RJN how pleased he was to see it in print.