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 ...

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 ...

Sign up for The Media Today, CJR’s daily newsletter. When we talked about “bizarro” words last week, we promised to talk this week about the difference between ...

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 ...