Far too many students find schoolwork to be boring. There are multiple reasons, but a main one is that academic instruction is typically framed in plain-vanilla, academic language and style. In the ...

For the best experience, please enable JavaScript in your browser settings. Inter alia, the Media Observer had this to say in last week’s issue: “And now for the ...

Biologists in particular are writing their papers in a less formal style. We are not supposed to use first-person pronouns, and contractions aren’t allowed. These rules also discourage unattended ...

The high priests of education promote formalism because it seems more impressive and more authoritative. Students, however, live in their own world of distinctively informal language, and teenagers ...