Cleveland Abbe’s “The Teacher and the Student” (1909)
This short essay was published in Monthly Weather Review in January 1909, as part of the Summary of 1908 (p. 453). The text is copied verbatim, including what we would now recognize as non-gender-neutral language and grammatical errors. THE TEACHER AND THE STUDENT The good work that is done in meteorology is often accomplished by […]
Godwin’s Law for Emails to Journal Editors
January 30, 2015 Filed under Blog, Featured, Publishing
“…there is a tradition in many newsgroups and other Internet discussion forums that once such a comparison is made, the thread is finished and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever debate was in progress.” – Wikipedia entry for Godwin’s Law I am proposing a corollary: Godwin’s Law for Emails to Journal Editors. If […]
Advice to writers: Treat it like teaching
While helping a student write a particularly challenging chapter in his dissertation, it occurred to me that one piece of advice that may help him is to treat his writing like teaching. Imagine, if instead of communicating your science through a written report, you had to teach your ideas to students who had not seen […]
Why you need to read your page proofs carefully…
From http://www.theguardian.com/science/grrlscientist/2014/nov/12/scientific-schadenfreude:
Damn the tildes and full speed ahead!
Reader Matt Bunkers raised the issue of the tilde (~) in scientific writing. Some use it for “proportional to”. Others use it for “order of magnitude”. Still others use it for “approximately”. Given the wide variety of uses for the tilde, why not just write out what you mean? Doing so will make your writing […]
