When to use north arrows on maps

This topic came up in an e-mail discussion with Jon Zeitler, Science and Operations Officer at the National Weather Service Forecast Office in Austin, Texas. He advocated that maps should have horizontal length scales and north arrows on them. I agreed with him about the length scale, but felt that north arrows might … read more

Bob the Angry Flower speaks out against improper apostrophe use

Arial is a cheap imitation of Helvetica

While researching the book, I discovered this Web site proclaiming the glories of the sans serif font Helvetica and bemoaning the rise of Microsoft’s rip-off font Arial.
As the Web page says about Arial replacing Helvetica, “To an experienced designer, it was like asking for Jimmy Stewart and getting Rich Little.”
I have to admit that I … read more

Be creative in constructing your figures

With Adobe Illustrator and other similar graphics packages, scientists are more in control of their figures than ever before. You don’t have to rely on the default values and font types in your graphics software. One thing that you can do is create composite figures where two types of figures are combined to … read more

Did you know?

That “Web” as in “Web page” is capitalized?
That “chapter 5″ and “section 3.2″ are generally not capitalized, but “Figure 9″ and “Table 1″ are?
That Microsoft Word flags “a climatology” and “a cloud” as grammatically incorrect? [I don't know why. Does anyone out there?]
That “native English–speaking colleague” uses an en dash, but “English-speaking colleague” … read more

Me and Archimedes

Last month, Russ Schumacher, John Knox, and I submitted to Monthly Weather Review a paper on a case of banded precipitation in Colorado. Yesterday, we got the reviews back. Two things impressed me about the reviews.
1) Reviewer C was very knowledgeable on the topics we were writing about: banded precipitation, symmetric … read more

Recommended Reading

Previously, I provided three items of essential reading. Here are other books that I highly recommend for improving your scientific communication skills.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED READING ON WRITING
Cook (1986): Line by Line: How to Edit Your Own Writing delivers a thorough accounting of the editing process. The book deals mainly with sentence-level revisions and contains … read more

Can you answer “yes” to every question for every slide in your presentation?

From the NERC booklet Communicating Your Ideas. More about this booklet here.

Communicating Your Ideas-NERC

I was recently awarded a grant from NERC (UK Natural Environment Research Council) along with two colleagues at the University of Manchester. I was impressed on several fronts.
1) I believe one of the reasons that the proposal was funded was because of the strong “impacts” section that we wrote where we would convey our … read more

Quotes from Don’t Be Such a Scientist

On the recommendation of Prof. David Karoly, I bought Randy Olson’s Don’t Be Such a Scientist: Talking Substance in an Age of Style. I highly recommend this book for those who want to make their science more accessible to others (both scientists and nonscientists). Olson breaks down his observations of how best to … read more

Next Page »