Have you ever looked at a blank page and wondered how much support your paper will need? Or worried that there are already to many sources? It’s a familiar feeling among any student writer. More sources = better research right? Not necessarily. Quantity isn’t always the same thing as quality. While it take more than […]

Retention: Let’s face it, you download that dictionary app, make a grand plan for growing your vocabulary, and after two weeks your progress grind to a halt. That’s not due to a lack of trying. It’s due to an inability to account for how fast you forget what you just learned. Just because you looked […]

What do educators call the friction in a text? They call it unfamiliar word density: how many new words a passage throws at a reader in one sitting. To put it another way, it’s an exact measurement of unfamiliarity in form of a percentage. So what does that mean? Because higher the number, the less […]

You don’t cite because you want to spend hours running a citation marathon; you cite because you have a point to make, and you want your writing to reflect that point, not get bogged down with in-text citations. Most of us see in-text citations as a check-list: scatter ’em everywhere until the page is filled […]