I think your sentence demonstrates the difference between trying to fake "sounding smart" and just writing in a complex way.
Like seriously, "[exhaling air] continually engages our [...] mental faculties" is pretty nonsensical, since breathing is something autonomic. "Omnipresent chemical simulator" seems irrelavent in context. All in all, its a nonsense sentence
Now compare with the original sentence. Its an introduction to the paper. They are trying to establish why they are doing the research they are doing and why you should care. And it tells you - we did research into sound dapening because sound is all around us and its constantly effecting us. Which is something as a human i find to be true - the modern (urban) world is quite noisy. When there is too much noise it can be mentally exhausting and can tax my ability to understand those around me. After reading that sentence I now know why they are researching this area, and agree it is a worthy thing to research. That introductory sentence did everything an introductory sentence to a paper is supposed to do.
Sure, they use some fancy words, but they aren't even that fancy. It is a formal paper, i think high school level reading ability can be presumed.
The opening sentence isn't "complex" or "fancy" writing. It's LLM writing.
The paper has: "Sound, an omnipresent sensory stimulator, holds significant relevance in the human experience, as it continually engages our auditory and mental faculties."
This is just a sentence stuffed with adjectives. It conveys nothing beyond the definition of sound in a bunch of adjectives.
Complex (and admittedly annoying) writing would be something like: "Ever-cognizable and in continual interplay with our auditory faculties, sound is one of the most significant objects of human sense perception." This is annoying writing for sure, but it's well-constructed, unlike the LLM opener for the paper. It culminates with the fact that sound is important because it is ubiquitous to our perception.
"Fancy" writing would be a little more poetic, something like: "As stimulating as it is pervasive, as significant to the human experience as it is mundane, sound relentlessly occupies our sensory and mental perception: whether significant or inconsequential, substantial or infinitesimal, sound is all at once the vehicle of our heritage, the body of our cognitive terroir, and the symbol of our highest arts."
This sentence is also annoying, but only because it's kind of pretentious. But there is a point here: sound is powerful to human beings.
I think the problem with our times is that people cannot tell the difference between complex writing, poetic writing, and just plain adjective-stuffed LLM writing. Which all comes down to the fact that we as a culture have devalued complex writing. Complex writing isn't read in schools, nor taught at any level of schooling. It's actually disencouraged in every Freshman writing class.
I strongly disagree. The example sentences you give would be very out of place in a scientific paper. If i saw them there i would assume an LLM wrote them because they are inapproiate to the genere of writing and LLMs sometimes have trouble with that type of context.
Writing is all about context. What is a good sentence in one context might be a terrible sentence in another context.
To go in more detail
> The paper has: "Sound, an omnipresent sensory stimulator, holds significant relevance in the human experience, as it continually engages our auditory and mental faculties." This is just a sentence stuffed with adjectives. It conveys nothing beyond the definition of sound in a bunch of adjectives.
That sentence doesn't say anything about the definition of sound at all. It makes 2 claims that are important - sound is everywhere and sound affects people. Neither of them have anything to do with what sound is. I imagine the author (correctly) assumes the target audience already knows the definition of "sound".
> Complex (and admittedly annoying) writing would be something like: "Ever-cognizable and in continual interplay with our auditory faculties, sound is one of the most significant objects of human sense perception." This is annoying writing for sure, but it's well-constructed, unlike the LLM opener for the paper. It culminates with the fact that sound is important because it is ubiquitous to our perception.
Sure, that might be a fine sentence in some other article, but why would it work here? It promotes the aside, that sound is important to humans, to the main idea. However that makes no sense in context. The author isn't writing an essay on the importance of sound. Sound being important is not the primary thing the author is trying to set up here, so why would you cumulate with that?
Re the fancy one - I would say the same thing. There are plenty of contexts where that would be a fine sentence, but this isn't one of them. It is inappropriate to the genere in question and communicates the wrong idea. Sound might be powerful but this isn't an essay on how sound is powerful.
In this case they could have just said "hearing is trivially important to most humans" without any loss of value to the paper. The purple prose seems to add nothing at all.
Like seriously, "[exhaling air] continually engages our [...] mental faculties" is pretty nonsensical, since breathing is something autonomic. "Omnipresent chemical simulator" seems irrelavent in context. All in all, its a nonsense sentence
Now compare with the original sentence. Its an introduction to the paper. They are trying to establish why they are doing the research they are doing and why you should care. And it tells you - we did research into sound dapening because sound is all around us and its constantly effecting us. Which is something as a human i find to be true - the modern (urban) world is quite noisy. When there is too much noise it can be mentally exhausting and can tax my ability to understand those around me. After reading that sentence I now know why they are researching this area, and agree it is a worthy thing to research. That introductory sentence did everything an introductory sentence to a paper is supposed to do.
Sure, they use some fancy words, but they aren't even that fancy. It is a formal paper, i think high school level reading ability can be presumed.