Which sentence works better?
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Humor augments pedagogy with asynchronous and synchronous elements to create a rich educational tapestry and an enhanced instructional environment.
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Humor makes learning fun.
Most educators instinctively write sentences like the first one.
It’s a habit learned in college: impress the professor with big words and complicated phrasing. Academic writing often rewards complexity—even when it sacrifices clarity.
But if you’re trying to be funny, that approach violates the first commandment of comedy:
Know your audience.
Humorists constantly rewrite material so the audience can immediately understand the joke. Humor that requires translation rarely survives long enough to reach the punchline.
That’s why many humor writers follow a simple rule borrowed from journalism:
Write at about a middle-school reading level.
When I’m preparing instructional humor, I often check my writing with Word’s readability tools, including the Flesch Reading Ease score, to make sure I don’t sound like a dissertation.
I also use tools like Grammarly, which can help tailor tone and clarity for a specific audience.
Many educators worry that simplifying their writing means “dumbing down” the material.
It doesn’t.
Clear writing doesn’t weaken ideas—it strengthens them.
Academic language might impress the APA style gods.
But when it comes to classroom humor, the goal is much simpler:
Make the idea clear.
And make learning fun.
