Without reading your paper, and without rejecting your hypothesis, let me propose other consequences of casual language. Experts use tools casually, but there may be pitfalls for beginners. Experts are allowed more casual language and the referee may not trust that you, personally, are an expert. That is a signaling explanation, but somewhat different. A very different explanation is that while your ultimate goal is to teach the reader your casual process, but that does not mean that recording it is the best method. Your casual language may hide the pitfalls from beginners, contributing both to their incorrect usage and to their not understanding how to choose between tools.
If your paper is aimed purely at experts, then casual language is the best means of communication. But should it be? Remember when you were a beginner. How did you learn the tools you are using? Did you learn them from papers aimed at beginners or experts; aimed at teaching tools or using them? Casual language papers can be useful for beginners as an advertisement: “Once you learn these tools, you can reason quickly and naturally, like me.”
Professors often say that they are surprised by which of their papers is most popular. In particular, they are often surprised that a paper that they thought was a routine application of a popular tool becomes popular as an exposition of that tool; often under the claim that it is a new tool. This is probably a sign that the system doesn’t generate enough exposition, but taking the system as given, it means that an important purpose of research papers is exposition, that they really are aimed at beginners as well as experts.
This is not to say that I endorse formal language. I don’t think that formal language often helps the reader over the pitfalls; that work must be reconstructed by the reader regardless of whether it the author spelled it out. But I do think that it is important to point out the dangers..
Without reading your paper, and without rejecting your hypothesis, let me propose other consequences of casual language. Experts use tools casually, but there may be pitfalls for beginners. Experts are allowed more casual language and the referee may not trust that you, personally, are an expert. That is a signaling explanation, but somewhat different. A very different explanation is that while your ultimate goal is to teach the reader your casual process, but that does not mean that recording it is the best method. Your casual language may hide the pitfalls from beginners, contributing both to their incorrect usage and to their not understanding how to choose between tools.
If your paper is aimed purely at experts, then casual language is the best means of communication. But should it be? Remember when you were a beginner. How did you learn the tools you are using? Did you learn them from papers aimed at beginners or experts; aimed at teaching tools or using them? Casual language papers can be useful for beginners as an advertisement: “Once you learn these tools, you can reason quickly and naturally, like me.”
Professors often say that they are surprised by which of their papers is most popular. In particular, they are often surprised that a paper that they thought was a routine application of a popular tool becomes popular as an exposition of that tool; often under the claim that it is a new tool. This is probably a sign that the system doesn’t generate enough exposition, but taking the system as given, it means that an important purpose of research papers is exposition, that they really are aimed at beginners as well as experts.
This is not to say that I endorse formal language. I don’t think that formal language often helps the reader over the pitfalls; that work must be reconstructed by the reader regardless of whether it the author spelled it out. But I do think that it is important to point out the dangers..