I don’t know any of the people involved, but I suspect that Skerry was not intentionally writing in jargon; it’s just hard to write clearly. Harder than many readers realize, and maybe harder than you, as a professional writer, realize. My guess is that Skerry was trying his best but he just doesn’t know any better.

I had a similar discussion with a friend on this topic a while ago, where he was accusing academics of deliberately writing obscurely, to make their work seem deeper than it really is, and I replied that we’d all like to write clearly but it’s not so easy to do so. I’ve written several books myself, but I’m a statistician, not a creative writer, and I’m always struggling to write clearly and with minimal jargon.

There are some fundamental difficulties here, the largest of which, I think, is that the natural way to explain a confusing point is to add more words—but if you add too many words, it’s hard to follow the underlying idea. Especially given that writing is one-dimensional; you can’t help things along with intonation, gestures, and facial expressions. There’s the smiley-face and its cousin, the gratuitous exclamation point (which happened to be remarked upon by Alan Bennett in that same issue of the LRB), but that’s slim pickings considering all the garnishes available for augmenting face-to-face spoken conversation.