Societal changes and journal guidelines drive the evolution of scientific writing. For instance, take this comparison of two articles on the same topic in different decades. The changes over time are obvious (see below). Today, the impact of the Internet has been to cause article lengths to shorten, not lengthen.
From \cite{Morata_1977}

> “However, this is explicable if we assume that wingless is a member of a new class of homeotic mutations which affect cooperative decisions taken by [wing imaginal] discs as a whole rather than decisions taken individually by each cell. This interpretation is supported by the analysis of penetrance of wingless. We found that, unlike the other homeotic mutants mentioned above, the expression of wingless is all or none, so that, when expressed, all of the cells of the duplicated notum are transformed. We never find cases of partial transformation in which some cells are transformed into notum and others remain wing. Since the probability of one disc being transformed does not affect the probability of any of the others, the decision whether to differentiate a normal wing or a duplicated notum is taken by each disc independently. Thus, it seems that the wingless mutation is a defect in a decision made by groups of cells.” Now12: Expression of dpp in the VM responds to Wg signalling. We show that wg and dTcf mutations eliminate BE reporter gene expression in PS3 and slightly reduce it in PS7. A similar result was reported for Dpp protein in an arm mutant background. Our result is surprising because Drosophila embryos have a large amount of maternal embryonic dTcf RNA. We were not expecting the null dTcf phenotype to be similar to that of wg, which is expressed only zygotically. We conclude that Wg signalling is required for activation of dpp in PS3 and assists in the activation in PS7. We also suggest that the maternal contribution of dTcf may not play a role in this activation.”

From \cite{Yang_2000}

> "Expression of dpp in the VM responds to Wg signalling. We show that wg and dTcf mutations eliminate BE reporter gene expression in PS3 and slightly reduce it in PS7. A similar result was reported for Dpp protein in an arm mutant background. Our result is surprising because Drosophila embryos have a large amount of maternal embryonic dTcf RNA. We were not expecting the null dTcf phenotype to be similar to that of wg, which is expressed only zygotically. We conclude that Wg signalling is required for activation of dpp in PS3 and assists in the activation in PS7. We also suggest that the maternal contribution of dTcf may not play a role in this activation.”

Unfortunately, manuscripts today are more verbose and laden with acronyms. They also contain more words associated with hype and spin \cite{Vinkers_2015} (see Figure \ref{238985}). This hyperbole comes at the cost of accuracy.