re the contronyms: clearly a U.S. audience. When I was stuck in bed for too long, listening to Radio Canada International helped maintain my sanity. Except it took me around 8 months to understand that to table a bill in the Canadian Parliament means to introduce it for discussion. (In my U.S. experience, to table a motion means to stop talking about it.)

Sue Burke creates a fascinating sf world in Semiosis/Interference. This pair of novels examines the interactions between really big and really controlling plants and the would-be colonizing humans. It's nifty!

Plain language is delightful, and really hard. It's the extreme case of if I had more time to write I would have made it shorter which, it turns out, is not Mark Twain, but Blaise Pascal. The Conscious Style Guide has some more resources. I'm reading Fading Scars, a great disability rights memoir/history by Corbett Joan O'Toole. Corbett attempts plain language in a field where academics have sown a thicket of 50 cent words. She advises:

• break your thesis into smaller chunks. Restate important points in each chunk, so they stand alone
• begin with an overview view; end with a highlight of key points with a Just the facts, ma'am
• refer only to online, not published, sources to increase accessibility.