Yep. I tried to write my dissertation in an accessible way, and my thesis committee's only feedback was on the style. They didn't even bother to read the content.

Then I dropped out and posted the dissertation on the web, instead. I didn't want to ruin it by making it "academic" enough.

Firstly, most people are bad at writing. Writing is a skill so like all other skills it stands to reason that most people won’t be good at it. When it comes to people who are writing a dissertation, you’re looking for the intersection of people who are good enough at the other discipline to be in the position of writing a dissertation (presumably for a PhD) and are also good at writing, so it’s going to be a small subset of people who are going to do that well. Not saying these people don’t exist (Feynman is a famous example, but there are others).

Secondly, writing a dissertation is hard. Technical vocabulary, jargon etc generally exists because it is a helpful shortcut to communication with experts in a particular field. So for most people, writing their dissertation such that it could be readable by a layperson would generally make an already hard thing harder and doesn’t add anything in particular that’s helpful to experts (if anything might make it harder for experts because they would need to wade through things that are redundant or unnecessary to their understanding) so you’re making it harder in a way that doesn’t particularly benefit you. Why do that?

A graduate student is shouldering both the opportunity cost of spending more time, and the risk of not finishing. Things can happen almost at random that can knock you off your horse or shoot it out from under you. Like, your advisor can lose funding, change jobs, or even just up and die. You can get sick.

Once you've got a thesis worth of data (or whatever you need), your best bet is to write it up as clearly and concisely as will get you "published and outa here" in the words of my fellow grad students. Don't even spend time choosing a font. (A friend did that).

PhD students get a limited number of innovation tokens to spend. One of the many ways to spend them is on the form of the dissertation.

Think of it more like conforming to a certain communication standard, specific to the academic field. The language needs to be concise, precise, and correct use of terminology to avoid as much ambiguity as possible. Colloquial form of writing is often open to interpretation and may not be understood by international readers (for example), as cultural norms are different. Academic and technical communication on aims to eliminate these barriers.

A rare occurrence, a few months ago, I came across one (re: a dissertation that is both entertaining and for the lay): Neocosmicism: God and the Void (2013) by Ellen Greenham[1].

It seems like it eventually came into fruition as a full-fledged book: After Engulfment: Cosmicism and Neocosmicism in H. P. Lovecraft, Philip K. Dick, Robert A. Heinlein, and Frank Herbert (2022) by Ellen Greenham[2].

1: https://researchportal.murdoch.edu.au/esploro/outputs/doctor...

2: https://www.hippocampuspress.com/other-authors/nonfiction/af...

It takes a lot of skill to meaningfully communicate complex and deep topics to people who are not already familiar with the field.

Deemed non-proper in a lot of field and by many advisor (whose approval you need). But, also, technical vocabulary is specific which matter when you operate at the edge of knowledge.

The point of the dissertation is to become certified as a PhD. Most supervisors are not open to the idea of stepping outside the norm. Which is downright tragic, as research should be all about that.

My writing was actively criticized wherever I tried to use simple vocabulary. It was heartbreaking, and made me resent academia to this day.

Too much work, and you have to nail it or else you might get railed for a half-baked dissertation