Some of the neighbors may talk in code, but if that gets heavy, just move on down the block. One engineering professor, struggling with that assignment, said he'd fully expected to have trouble finding the answer to questions in the humanities, but not that he would not be able to understand the question. I wrote enough to answer the question. Which means there are conventions in literary analysis for how much is enough to answer a question that outsiders to literature aren't explicitly told. The scientists and engineers were skeptical about interpretation more generally.
Poetry seems to favor the expression of ideas in purposefully complex and equivocal language.
One conclusion, not mine, might be that disciplinary cultures are so different that it is likely scientists and literary critics are born and not made. Best for students to find the subjects that are intellectually and temperamentally suited to them, and leave other disciplines to those who find them more to their taste. And those who teach in college owe ourselves the experience of being on the boundaries of other disciplines, too.