New “Eloquent” article now published

Following up on a previous post, “Occluded fronts and the occlusion process: A fresh look at conventional wisdom” has now been published in BAMS. Download it here.

One of the most challenging (and satisfying) articles I’ve written

I recently coauthored a paper that has now been accepted for publication in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Schultz, D. M., and G. Vaughan, 2011: Occluded fronts and the occlusion process: A fresh look at conventional wisdom. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 92, doi: 10.1175/2010BAMS3057.1. This paper is the first one I’ve written solely … read more

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 … read more

Where to publish case studies in meteorology

Dr. Alexander Keul of Salzburg University asked me whether any journals were publishing case studies in meteorology. What was interesting was that I had received another question or two along these lines recently. Seemed like an opportunity to blog. I would argue that there are two extremes of what one might call “case studies.” On … read more

“PowerPoint makes us stupid.”

This story is from The New York Times about how PowerPoint has been used (or banned, in some cases) from military meetings and briefings. “We have met the enemy and he is PowerPoint.”

Eloquent Science won an EXCEL Award

From Sarah Jane Shangraw, AMS Books Managing Editor: Eloquent Science has won an EXCEL award from Association Media & Publishing. Each year the Association, formerly known as the Society of National Association Publishers, bestows EXCEL awards in several categories of media and publication, including two book categories: technical and non-technical. Within each category they award … read more

Redundancy in scientific writing

You may remember an elementary or middle school English teacher urging you to vary the vocabulary in your writing. I have a very strong memory of that from my youth. Such strict lessons from an early age may be difficult to break, but scientific writing does not have to be like prose writing for English … read more

What Writing This Book Taught Me

[DMS: This was going to be a sidebar in the last chapter of Eloquent Science, but we decided upon removing it to shorten the text. Remarkably personal, this text shows the struggles that I had to go through to deliver text I was happy with (or at least satisfied with).] 14 March 2008: Mary Golden … read more

American versus British English

[DMS: This was a sidebar that I cut from the book.  Even before I met and married my British–Australian wife, I had this sidebar in mind very early in the planning of the book.] Over 300 years of separation has led to discernible differences between English as practiced in the United States and English as … read more