A few days ago, I Tweeted “The top scientific journal style guides urge us to write clearly. Why don’t we follow them?” when linking to this post. Here’s one answer: bad models.

…people today are so accustomed to pretentious nonsense that they see nothing amiss in reading without understanding, and many of them at length discover that they can without difficulty write in like manner themselves and win applause for it. And so it perpetuates itself.

~G. A. Wells (via Science Quotes)