Dump the tilde
I am an Assistant Editor at the Electronic Journal of Severe Storms Meteorology. As we have no paid staff, we depend upon authors to send us manuscripts that are near-ready to publish. The rest of the work we do ourselves, including much of the layout, technical and copy editing, and Web pages. For all that, […]
Denotation versus Connotation
In Eloquent Science, I mention understanding the difference between denotation (the literal meaning of a word) and connotation (the idea or feeling that the word evokes in the listener). This idea hit home recently when I was co-writing a proposal with a British colleague. He had written the word “envisage”, which I thought sounded a […]
Writing Advice from William Safire
Dave Jorgensen sent me this wonderful piece of writing advice from author, columnist, and presidential speechwriter William Safire. 1. No sentence fragments. 2. It behooves us to avoid archaisms. 3. Also, avoid awkward or affected alliteration. 4. Don’t use no double negatives. 5. If I’ve told you once, I’ve told you a thousand times, “Resist […]
Flattering review in Polar Research
Kevin R. Wood of the Joint Institute for the Study of the Atmosphere and Ocean, University of Washington, has written a flattering review in Polar Research. Here are some excerpts. …at the time of my first reading of Eloquent science, I was rewriting a paper that had not, shall we say, passed gracefully through the […]
Are students prepared for university-level writing?
Kim Brooks has this essay “Death to High School English” published in Salon.com. She details her experiences with finding students who don’t know the basics of writing: composition, structure, thesis statements, grammar, punctuation, and plagiarism. My own experiences here in the UK with final-year environmental-science majors were remarkably similar to hers, so the problem isn’t […]
Why does nothing this interesting ever happen at any conferences I attend?
May 11, 2011 Filed under Blog, Featured, Humor, Presentations
From the Huffington Post: Guerrilla improv troupe Improv Everywhere struck again last month at GEL Conference, the annual gathering of tech/social media/business voices in New York City. With the help of GEL founder Mark Hurst, the covert entertainers pulled off one of their signature “Spontaneous Musicals” at the top of Hurst’s presentation. Just as he […]
The Increasing Number of Open-Access Publishers: A Good Thing?
As a specialist in your field of research, we are pleased to invite you to contribute to our forthcoming Open Access book, XXXXXX. The book will be published by XXXXXX, Open Access publisher of books and journals in the fields of science, technology and medicine. XXXXX is a pioneer in the publication of Open Access […]
Take the Pledge: I Won’t Use Map-room Jargon!
If you regularly attend discussions in the weather-map room, subscribe to weather or storm-chaser discussion lists, or have reviewed articles for Weather, Monthly Weather Review, National Weather Digest, or Weather and Forecasting, then you have been exposed to it. Map-room jargon. Often the speakers of map-room jargon don’t even know what they are doing. (I […]
Lessons for scientific writers from Leonard Cohen and Tony Bennett
I’ve been laid up with the flu for the past few days, so I’ve been watching more TV and DVDs than I normally do. One DVD that I’ve had for some time, but only got around to watching the other day was Leonard Cohen: Live In London. The concert was recorded just a few months […]
Review in Weather
In the March 2011 issue of Weather, Bob Prichard, Editor, wrote a nice review of Eloquent Science, calling it “highly commendable.” That review can be read here. The issue with commas that Bob raised is referred to as the serial comma. The style of many American publishers is to use the serial comma, whereas the […]
