How to buy a signed copy of the book
The fastest way to get the book in the United States is by ordering through the American Meteorological Society. The book is now ready to ship, and I have heard that people have received their copies relatively timely. If you want me to send you a copy personally, I am happy to do so and […]
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 […]
Errata: Figure 19.1
Please replace Fig. 19.1 on p. 227 with the correct version below. I had inadvertently used an earlier version of the figure that Dave Whiteman supplied, and this error slipped past both his and my readings of the page proofs.
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 […]
The shortest title ever written
I discovered this article while browsing on the Web site of Rutgers University mathematician Doron Zeilberger. Among his voluminous Web page (we’re talking Doswell-level voluminous), I came across this page. The article came about when Prof. Zeilberger was asked to give a talk to the Research Experience for Undergraduates program at the Rutgers Math Department. […]
Outlines in Scientific Presentations
November 6, 2009 Filed under Blog, Presentations
I asked my friends and colleagues for quotations that I could put in the book. I had way more than I could use. Here is one that was not used. This might be controversial, but I never start a talk with an outline of what I’m going to talk about. If it’s a short talk […]
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 […]
Appendix B: Commonly Misused Scientific Words and Expressions
Download a sample chapter from the book.
Chapter 8: Constructing Effective Paragraphs
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Why word order in titles is important: Example 1
“The Identification of Alcohol Intoxication by Police,” J. Brick and J. A. Carpenter, Alcoholism: Clinical Experimentation and Research, June 2001, vol. 25, no. 6, pp. 850-5. <http://tinyurl.com/yd9rv4r> ——– From the mini-Annals of Improbable Research: October 2009, Issue number 2009-10. ISSN 1076-500X 2009-10-08 RESEARCH SPOTLIGHT: Brick/Carpenter Confusion
