In my Language Disorders class, we are working on developing a resource guide for parents about language and communication disorders and differences. My group is concentrating on autism, and our first assignment was to write a paper on its etiology. The paper was supposed to be written in -- these are the key words -- a colloquial style.

Today my professor gave back our papers and selected a few sample sentences from them as examples of passages that were far too academic. Mine was one of them. I had written:

"Other studies document the atypical progression of brain development among children with autism, causing some scientists to hypothesize that the brains of children with autism may become 'overloaded' with neural matter that fails to function appropriately."

What on God's green earth gave me the impression that this was an appropriate sentence to include in a colloquially written paper? Apparently years of academic writing and pretending to know what the hell I'm talking about in order to impress my professors has robbed me of the ability to write for a general audience.

I'm going to go rewrite my paper now, and that sentence will not appear in it.