I am not the lay person, and I am not talking about communicating your findings to the pubic, which obviously requires an entirely different set of skills than communicating your work to fellow scientists (another problem, but one step at a time!). This is purely a comment on the typical language and style of writing used in papers - not on the content itself, per se, although the two are to a certain extent linked.

> I'm a PhD student, and never have I read a paper with wording that I would describe as "convoluted."

What field are you in, because I wonder if this makes a difference? I'm in a highly interdisciplinary field, so perhaps that's part of the problem.