Style
Now that the time-honored tradition of griping about academic prose style has, once again, reared its head (see, e.g., discussions here and here), I find myself feeling a trifle curious: who are the good writers? And what do we mean when we say an academic text is well-written? After all, unlike fiction, a monograph or general survey is (one hopes) about something--and most of us would, I suspect, sacrifice a style-rich but content-poor example of academic prose to something quite the opposite. Edward Said, after all, was a fine stylist, but I haven't noticed a groundswell of support for him on that accord. Among literary critics still alive and kicking, Nina Baym, Terry Castle, Claude Rawson, Elaine Showalter, and Judith Wilt all write crisp prose. And I have a penchant for that variety of English academic style characterized by both irony and abrupt shifts from formal to colloquial registers. (It's impossible not to chuckle when, in the "recommended reading" section of God's Last Words, David Katz wryly suggests that we read an "obscure book" by...David Katz.)
Some complaints about jargon seem to be more about unfamiliar technical terms than an excess thereof. I'm the first person to admit that advanced scholarship on prosody often inspires me with a burning desire to go curl up in the fetal position. "Can we credit the non-phonetician listener with utilising such evasive phonetic cues as phoneme prolongation, glottal stop, or the absence of coarticulation in the processing of the rhythmical performance of poetry?" Good question, that. Similarly, my attempt several years ago to read T. F. Torrance's Scottish Theology foundered dreadfully on his cheerful assumption that he didn't need to define terms like federal theology (scroll down). In both cases, my ignorance is/was at issue, not the jargon. When I complain about English academic prose, I'm more likely to be grumbling about passive voice clotted with nominalized verbs than about jargon-stuffed sentences ("the subjective heteronormativity of post-post-colonial fragmented national identities"*). The latter are more likely to occur in "straight" theory--not surprisingly, since literary theory can easily slouch off into abstractions--whereas the former tend to crop up in literary criticism proper.
Back to the question. Who writes well?
*--Yes, I made that up. No, I have no idea what it means. But it sure sounds awful, whatever it is.