This is bigger than trying to impress a journal editor to get a paper published, or convincing department chairs and academic committees in order to get tenure.

I am talking the process of matching the expectations of an entire community and meeting the norms of that community. College students and some new grad students are coming as outsiders who don’t know the rules of the game, but they quickly figure out (from reading academic papers and scholarly books that are assigned to them and examining the profiles of their instructors) that “publishing” is the currency of the realm.

They will begin to match their terminology, writing styles, and references to meet the norms of this community and to get their own publishing output accepted. By the time they are ready to publish their first paper they’ve been effectively indoctrinated and will continue perpetuate academic writing styles.