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 […]
