Fairly often, a positive NY Times review of a professor's book by is qualified, probably rightly so, by something like this:

• Pretentious capitalization shouldn't scare you off. . . . occasionally hard to read. The difficulty of the prose is self-defeating. . . . plodding abstractions . . . a migraine in waiting. . . . text clotted with academese. (12/6/13)

That's from Raillan Brooks reviewing two new books about "Aerosol Art" or graffiti. Brooks notices the irony of celebrating street art in sentences that many people can't read. Doubly sad is that most problems with academic prose are addressed with brevity, practicality, and wit in Revising Prose by Richard Lanham--even in just his short first chapter. Or check out the more advanced and far-reaching Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace by Joseph Williams and Joseph Bizup. Both books are available inexpensively in good earlier editions on the used-book market, too.

You will find a quick example of Lanham's method here and below, where you see two versions of one of the today's sentences, first rough and then improved with Lanham's help:

• The irony of a celebration of street art being rendered unreadable by its prose style for a wide educated audience does not escape the reviewer, of course.

• Brooks notices the irony of celebrating street art in sentences that many people can't read. (about half the words)