Someone who thinks that typos are a mark of poor writing has plainly never made a living as a writer. Professionally speaking, writing should not be confused with proofreading or copy editing, which are laudable but separate professions in themselves. Fingers may slip, overzealous algorithms may alter what is written. Neither has anything whatever to do with the quality of the thought or the skill with which the writer conveys it.

Upon reading your piece I became interested in the point that undergraduates, novice scholars who are not necessarily anthro majors nor anthros in the making, might not be able to grasp the central argument of an ethnography written in inaccessible prose. I’d think that in general many, if not most, people would have difficulties reading through something that is poorly written. However, when you say that certain ethnographies are written in “impenetrable prose,” I ask myself exactly which ethnographies are you referring to?

In my experience dealing with undergraduates I found that their (in)ability to grasp the arguments of a certain range of ethnographies had less to do with the author’s prose and more to do with their skill level in critically assessing arguments and understanding how to judge the merit of a social scientific study.

It is one thing for a book to be written in convoluted prose but it is quite another for a book to be written clearly and with technical terms to describe a certain class of phenomenon. The quote above carries a technical term, quite practical for scholars working in kinship, that should in principle make it easy to understand its referent. This leads me to challenge your idea that such technical terms “make an otherwise simple concept sound more complex,” on the grounds that these terms serve to establish an unambiguous means of describing phenomena.

For example, lets say I wanted to discuss post-marital residence patterns with my neighbor. I could ask that neighbor, “hey, in your culture after your daughter/son gets married (assuming its a monogamous,heterosexual marriage) where does s/he live? After receiving some response I would then speak of the phenomena along the lines of S/D lives with partner’s parents, relatives or in new place. Such a means of describing this phenomenon is fine for everyday chat, but it is rather lengthy. But in the realm of anthropological research it would be much simpler to simply say that post-marital residence is patrilocal, matrilocal, neolocal etc.

These technical terms serve a purpose. They should be clearly explained so that they can be understood by the reader, but in a scholarly article or book directed at other researchers in the field it may be a bit repetitive and inconvenient to have to describe certain terms unless they are already used in different ways by various scholars.