Be creative in constructing your figures

With Adobe Illustrator and other similar graphics packages, scientists are more in control of their figures than ever before. You don’t have to rely on the default values and font types in your graphics software. One thing that you can do is create composite figures where two types of figures are combined to create a […]

Did you know?

That “Web” as in “Web page” is capitalized? That “chapter 5” and “section 3.2” are generally not capitalized, but “Figure 9” and “Table 1” are? That Microsoft Word flags “a climatology” and “a cloud” as grammatically incorrect? [I don’t know why. Does anyone out there?] That “native English–speaking colleague” uses an en dash, but “English-speaking […]

Me and Archimedes

Last month, Russ Schumacher, John Knox, and I submitted to Monthly Weather Review a paper on a case of banded precipitation in Colorado. Yesterday, we got the reviews back. Two things impressed me about the reviews. 1) Reviewer C was very knowledgeable on the topics we were writing about: banded precipitation, symmetric instability, and inertial […]

Recommended Reading

Previously, I provided three items of essential reading. Here are other books that I highly recommend for improving your scientific communication skills. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED READING ON WRITING Cook (1986): Line by Line: How to Edit Your Own Writing delivers a thorough accounting of the editing process. The book deals mainly with sentence-level revisions and contains […]

Can you answer “yes” to every question for every slide in your presentation?

From the NERC booklet Communicating Your Ideas. More about this booklet here.

Communicating Your Ideas-NERC

I was recently awarded a grant from NERC (UK Natural Environment Research Council) along with two colleagues at the University of Manchester. I was impressed on several fronts. 1) I believe one of the reasons that the proposal was funded was because of the strong “impacts” section that we wrote where we would convey our […]

Quotes from Don’t Be Such a Scientist

On the recommendation of Prof. David Karoly, I bought Randy Olson’s Don’t Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style. I highly recommend this book for those who want to make their science more accessible to others (both scientists and nonscientists). Olson breaks down his observations of how best to communicate to […]

Talking Science: The Elusive Art of the Science Talk

This 18-minute video called “Talking Science: The Elusive Art of the Science Talk” was produced by the USC Wrigley Institute for Environmental Studies and the USC Annenberg School for Communication. It was made by Randy Olsen, author of Don’t Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style. I was informed of Olsen’s […]

University of Chicago Press blog entry

Eloquent Science was featured on Cryptonym, the University of Chicago Press blog: http://pressblog.uchicago.edu/distributed/2009/12/david_m_schultz_on_climategate.html

New Year’s resolutions to make for 2010

If you want to make two resolutions for 2010, here’s what I recommend. One for scientific presentations: I will not start my talks with an “Outline” slide. Instead, I will motivate my talk with something to grab the attention of the audience and get them interested in what I am about to say. Read more […]

« Previous Page — Next Page »