Eloquent Science at the AMS Annual Meeting
If you’ll be at the American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting in Seattle in January, please stop by one of the Eloquent Science events. 1. Sunday 23 January: Improving Your Writing Skills for Students and Scientists, at end of the AMS Student Conference. 2. 9:45-11:00 a.m., Tuesday 25 January: Book signing at the AMS Books Booth […]
Losing Your Way
December 17, 2010 Filed under Excerpts, Uncategorized, Writing
This section is published in the October 2010 issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Volume 91, p. 1416.
How to Fail in Grant Writing
Curtis Wood (Univ of Reading) sends this article from The Chronicle of Higher Education. How to Fail in Grant Writing Another in the series of “How Not To…” papers… Fourteen Ways to Say Nothing with Scientific Visualization. How to Make a Scientific Lecture Unbearable. How to Get Your Paper Rejected. How to Write Consistently Boring […]
A heretical parenthetical thought
George Bryan sent me this article from the 9 November 2010 issue of Eos. Robock, A., 2010: Parentheses are (are not) for references and clarification (saving space). Eos, 91 (45), p. 419. Prof. Robock makes a strong case that sentences like the following are not clear, and that the added space in writing the sentence […]
A title in need of some help
This paper was published in Nature Geoscience in 2008. “Recent Antarctic ice mass loss from radar interferometry and regional climate modelling” My first reaction was “If radar interferometry and regional climate modelling are causing ice mass loss, then stop it, for the Earth’s sake!” — Photograph by Tim Laman/National Geographic Society
Teaching Scientific Communication Skills – BAMS article
My experiences teaching a scientific communications laboratory course based on Eloquent Science is described in a recent article published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Schultz, D. M., 2010: A university laboratory course to improve scientific communication skills. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 91, 1259–1266, ES25–34. Download the article here, along with its Electronic […]
Checklist for Statistics
I came across this statistical checklist from Nature. It details some common errors that many authors make in their manuscript, and Nature encourages authors to check this list before submission. I thought some were pretty obvious, but, then again, maybe people need to hear the obvious anyway. http://www.nature.com/nature/authors/gta/Statistical_checklist.doc Nature also has encourages additions to this […]
Review in Progress in Physical Geography
I am wishing that more scientists would follow the advice given in David Schultz’s excellent new book. The chapters are short – around ten pages each, on average – and self-contained. Therefore, readers may dip into and out of particular chapters of interest, if they prefer not to read the whole book sequentially. One reason […]
“Unnecessary” Quotation Marks
October 27, 2010 Filed under Blog, Uncategorized, Writing
I think people use quotation marks too often in scientific manuscripts. Be brave. Boldly define your term and use it sans quotation marks. It’s good to know that someone else thinks like me. Let me introduce you to The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks.
Check your reference list!
A recent paper published in Scientometrics by Robert Lopresti looks at the accuracy of citations in the five leading environmental science journals. Lopresti found that 24.4% of the references in the reference list had errors in them. Almost half of the errors were in the authors names. Almost 30% of the errors were in the […]
