Edward Tufte and kittens

Thanks to Mark Goetz!

A figure in need of help

I ran across this figure from an American Meteorological Society journal article recently. It’s just a simple scatterplot, which is so easy to construct, yet this figure has so many problems. 1. False alarm ratio and probability of detection are both quantities that can have values between 0 and 1, but the x axis ranges […]

Whether to use colons in titles

In Eloquent Science, I discuss my thoughts about colons in titles of scientific articles on pp. 24-25, but only briefly. Dave Mechem (University of Kansas) emailed me to express concern about their overuse in some disciplines like geography, humanities, and some of the social sciences. For an example, take a look at this issue of […]

Prof. Rob Fovell (UCLA) on PowerPoint and Teaching

I do not use PowerPoint in class. PowerPoint is virtually a necessity for scientific talks, but I think they often hurt classroom lectures. They lock me into a particular order, and they tend to make me go through material too fast. My handwriting is poor, but I write in class so I don’t go too […]

Correct use of the Kelvin temperature scale

Prof. Terence Day at Okanagan College, British Columbia, recently wrote an article describing the errors in textbooks. He argues that, “If the discipline of physical geography is a genuine natural science then the internationally recognized scientific units must be correctly used.” The issue is the Kelvin temperature scale. At the General Conference on Weights and […]

Appropriate way to label axes of graphs

Prof. Brian Fiedler of the University of Oklahoma recently published an article in Physics Education calling for a change in direction in teaching dimensionless ratios in physics. As he advocates, The tick marks [on an axis of a graph] are pure numbers. Labels with a solidus such as R/µm are orthodox notation for what the […]

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 be unnecessary […]

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 […]

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 create a […]

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 […]

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