Passive voice sucks the energy out of writing like a lamprey. My next writing assignment in an interdisciplinary seminar I'm teaching is to have students write an essay without using the passive voice. Use of the passive voice will result in a letter grade reduction on that assignment. My hope is that this exercise will focus our minds on word choice.
From today's Insider Higher Ed:
Educators have long worried about students who "choke" on key exams. A University of Chicago study,published this week in Science, finds that if such students are given the opportunity to write about the worries 10 minutes before the test, their anxiety is reduced and their performance on the test improves substantially.
My quest for find ways to create rich mutli-media eBooks continues. As of today, I have not found any interesting authoring tools that are based on open-standards like the ePUB format. Several videos of prototypes for content delivery are floating around the interwebs, some of which I relays in a previous post here (see UPDATED: Popular Science's Magazine of the Future. Is this the Textbook of the Future, too?).
