Could I write like Carol Weiss?

I remember my first academic workshop. Someone had read my paper and was not happy about it: Have you heard about the IMRAD format? I said yes. That was a lie. Or maybe not a lie. I had heard about IMRAD, I just had not paid it much attention. I thought academic writing could be done in various ways if the structure was logic and easy to follow, the reader was provided with the sufficient information and got my point. I was wrong. I did my PhD on the use of evaluation in Norwegian agencies, and I started off reading the classics. Articles and books mainly written in the 1970´s and early 1980´s or what Henry and Mark (2003) describe as «the golden age of research on evaluation use». In this period relatively large empirical studies of the relationship between evaluations and policymaking were performed and many of the most popular concepts and theoretical perspectives still in use come from this time. In the golden age, Carol Weiss (1927-2013) was the female star. According to Wikipedia, Weiss, a professor of education at Harvard, published 11 books, in addition to more than 100 journal articles. However, it was not before I started to read more recent papers on evaluation that I realized that Weiss was not only an outstanding academic she was also an excellent communicator. Yet, she was not alone. She belonged to a generation of academics, like Nathan Caplan and Karin Knorr Cetina who I all find to write in a different and more engaging and accessible way than many of their current colleagues within the social sciences. This makes me wonder whether the dominating norms for academic writing have developed in a direction that in practice hinders scholars from writing like Carol Weiss if they want their work to get published in standard academic journals? In this paper I will use articles by Weiss as an outset to discuss the current norms for academic articles. Norms which I believe make academic articles less available for people outside academia, for students and newcomers and for people with English as a second language. Taken together factors that have severe effect on the impact of academic research and the spreading of new ideas and evidence.