Posts tagged with "writing"

I begin – in continental style, unmotivated and, frankly, gratuitously – by defining Ackerman's function \(A\) over two integers: \[ A(m, n) = \left\{ \begin{array}{l} n + 1 & \mbox{ if $m=0$ } \\ A(m-1, 1) & \mbox{ if $m > 0$ and $n = 0$ } \\ A(m-1, A(m, n-1)) & \mbox{ if $m > 0$ and $n > 0$ } \end{array} \right. \]...

My colleague Steven Pinker has a nice piece up at the Chronicle of Higher Education on “Why Academics Stink at Writing”, accompanying the recent release of his new book The Sense of Style: The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century, which I’m awaiting my pre-ordered copy of....

With few exceptions, scholars would be better off writing their papers in a lightweight markup format called Markdown, rather than using a word-processing program like Microsoft Word. This post explains why, and reveals a hidden agenda as well.1 Microsoft Word is not appropriate for scholarly article production …lightweight… “Old two...

… altogether too much concern with the contents of the journal’s spine text… “reference” image by flickr user Sara S. used by permission. Precipitated by a recent request to review some proposals for new open-access journals, I spent some time gathering my own admittedly idiosyncratic thoughts on some of the...

...our little tiff in the late 18th century... "NYC - Metropolitan Museum of Art: Washington Crossing the Delaware" image by flickr user wallyg. Used by permission. I'm shortly off to give a talk at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of America (on why open access is better for...