The Baloney Detection Kit: A 10-Point Checklist for Science Literacy

In fact, brainpickings.org has a lot of good posts about books, creativity, life, and writing. Enjoy surfing!

Observed composite reflectivity (from the WSI NOWrad product) at 2315 UTC 16 Feb 2007.

Schumacher, R. S., D. M. Schultz, and J. A. Knox, 2010: Convective snowbands downstream of the Rocky Mountains in an environment with conditional, dry symmetric, and inertial instabilities. Mon. Wea. Rev., 138, 4416-4438. [HTML] [PDF]

Schultz, D. M., and J. A. Knox, 2006: Banded convection caused by frontogenesis in a conditionally, symmetrically, and inertially unstable environment. Mon. Wea. Rev., 135, 2095-2110. [HTML] [PDF]

Because Russ has a collection of these types of bands, the question arose how many different case studies do we need to present to make our point about how these bands form and evolve?

I argued that if we had one good set of simulations of this 16 Feb 2007 event, comprising a control case and some model sensitivity experiments, then we have enough material for a publishable paper. If we had run simulations on a different event and found out that the results were similar to the 16 Feb 2007 event, then we could say in our discussion section that we had performed the same simulations on a different event and came to the same conclusions. Although not definitive, because we got the same answer on two different events showing similar structures and evolutions to the bands, then we should have some faith that our results have some generality beyond a single event.  

I tend to view papers that present multiple cases to demonstrate the same point as tedious. As a reader, if I read through the development of a case and got the idea that the author was trying to communicate, then a second case doesn’t drive the point home any more clearly. I am bored.  

One big exception to my belief that one complete case is usually enough is if the authors are using two cases to contrast two different evolutions. A nice example of how you might do that is the following paper.  

Schultz, D. M., 2004: Cold fronts with and without prefrontal wind shifts in the central United States. Mon. Wea. Rev., 132, 2040-2053. [HTML] [PDF]

In the part of that paper containing the case studies, the focus was on comparing two cases: one cold front with a prefrontal trough and one without.  I felt it was an effective way to use multiple cases in the same paper.

Another situation where you might want to include multiple cases is a situation like Schumacher et al. (2010) where we were first calling attention to the existence of these bands. At the end of the paper, we presented a figure with three different cases illustrating that these banded structures occur more than once. In fact, they occur relatively frequently (a few times a year). So, some snapshots of the bands and brief descriptions of these events, comparing and contrasting them, help add some weight to our arguments that these are features worthy of study without adding the weight of much additional and unnecessary text.

To summarize, if a case study is clearly presented to illustrate a point that you as an author want to make, then I believe this is an effective means for using case studies.

For more on effective case studies in meteorology, read:

Schultz, D. M., 2010: How to research and write effective case studies in meteorology. Electronic J. Severe Storms Meteor., 5 (2), 1-18. [EJSSM]

(Image from http://ohinternet.com/Clippy)

“Just get words down on the page, because you can always sort it out later.“

The rationale?

Because the process of “sorting it out”, or editing, is 99% of the whole exercise!

If you leave clarifying your thoughts till last, you’ll end up will thousands and thousands of words, in “rough form”, but it’ll be unusable. You won’t have anything finished. And you’ll end up in a horrible situation of trying to edit your writing, working with stream-of-consciousness mess of a structure having forgotten what it was you were originally trying to say.

Instead, do it this way…

Edit as you write

The aim of your writing is to get an idea out of your head and onto the page in a way that will make sense to the reader.

The aim should always be clarity, but you need to clarify the idea in your own head before you can communicate it effectively to someone else.

When you write, the words will usually come out in a bit of a jumble because you’re thinking and clarifying ideas at the same time.

So the first version of a sentence will need some revision before it’s good enough to use.

…

When you’re explaining a complex idea, you must take the time to clarify your thought on the page, while it is still fresh in your head.

Give the thought the time and care it deserves. You must stop and edit the sentence to express yourself clearly before moving on, because if you just fill pages and come back to edit days or weeks later, the thought will be gone and it will be incredibly hard to sort out the mess of writing.

The author then gives an example:

The first version of a sentence will rarely be very good. But knowing that frees you from the pressures of perfectionism. You can write that sentence knowing that it’s just a first attempt.

Whatever you want to say, there are a huge number of ways you could write it. A huge number of possible solutions to the problem of communication:

* The cat sat on the mat
* The cat was sitting on the mat
* The mat had the cat sitting on it
* The cat was on the mat, sitting
* Sitting on the mat was the cat

And that’s just a single sentence describing one simple idea. So there are always alternatives, just by moving a couple of things around.

I disagree with this post because, for someone with writer’s block, for someone who is afraid to get started, or for someone who is a perfectionist, getting the words down on the page (subject to some constraints) is the ideal medicine to get moving on your thesis. If you are hobbled by these issues, then writing more and writing smartly is what is needed.

My response to this post was the following.

I appreciate what you are saying, but I think there are some nuances that need to be considered.

First, not all projects or people will write all their documents the same. I’ve published over 90 peer-reviewed articles and I don’t have a fixed style for writing. Some are meticulously outlined and organized from the start, and others are organized well in my head and flow easily out onto the paper. But, most result from me just jumping in and writing down my thoughts. Initially I do more writing than editing until the manuscript starts to take form, then I get to a point where I do more editing than writing. So, yes, editing is an important part of the writing process, but there is a point where writing dominates editing.

Second, sometimes the stream of consciousness writing can help open the floodgates that an author needs to get writing and get writing well. When I was writing my book Eloquent Science, it often took an hour or so to get into the mood to write after sitting in front of the keyboard. The first hour may not have produced much usable text, but it served the purpose of getting my ass in the chair and my brain in the right gear to produce more usable text later. If I worried about every little bit of text that I was creating and obsessed about its quality, I wouldn’t have been as productive. What I got out of 8 hours of effort was 7 hours of useful text and the first hour of warm-up text.

Third, a concept I talk about in my book is the writing/editing funnel. At the top of the funnel is the largest-scale issues: organization (chapters and sections). This is the first aspect to the document that an author needs to get in place. There’s no sense writing the perfect chapter of your thesis if it doesn’t fit into the framework that you’ve set for it. Then, going down the funnel, the writer should next focus on the paragraphs. Do all the paragraphs flow in order from one to the next? Do they make sense on the paragraph-scale? Then going down the funnel, you get to the sentences and then words, then small-scale stuff like grammar, spelling, and punctuation.

The idea of the funnel is to get authors to focus on the big picture first. Again, there’s no sense spending an hour crafting the perfect paragraph, if there is no place for it in the structure of the paper.

When in editing mode, it’s the same thing. No sense on fixing grammar and typos if the whole structure of the section of the thesis is rubbish. Fix the big issues at the top of the funnel first, then delve down to fix the little stuff.

So, when you say that you must ignore the advice to “just get it down on the page”, I think you need to qualify that. I guess it depends on the level of detail that you consider editing. In your example about the cat on the mat, the idea is down on paper. All of those examples would suffice for me to construct my argument through the stream-of-consciousness writing that often generates the greatest volume of text in our scientific papers. If after 70-90% of the manuscript is written, I didn’t like the first sentence, then I could change it one of the other sentences. It doesn’t bother me that it’s not perfectly crafted because the idea is serving a great placeholder for the eventual way I wish to say it.

UPDATE: James at 3monththesis.com has added a part 2 to clarify our discussion.

(Image from writebynight.net)

complex.

“Earthquakes are a complex problem.”

“Titan has a complex methane distribution over the Tropics.”

“To pin down the many complexities and feedbacks involved in jet stream blocking may prove to be difficult.”

“Governments and international research bodies alike must put money into funding research projects in the polar regions in order to heighten our understanding of these complex geological areas.”

These four examples are weak sentences. Saying that the issues are complex doesn’t tell me anything.

• For example, what about earthquakes makes it a complex problem? Is it that they cannot be predicted? Is it that much of the structure of the fault lies buried, and so only indirect means can be used to understand them?
• Rather than saying that Titan has a complex methane distribution, describe what this distribution looks like with height. Show a graph to illustrate the complexity of the distribution.
• Although we may not totally understand what causes and maintains blocking patterns in the atmosphere, it is a tractable problem, and the author has given us no insight into why there are “complexities” (whatever they are) that prevent us from understanding their mechanisms.
• In the last example, the word “complex” seems to be just thrown out there, to add importance to what is being said. It’s a weak argument, like coming out to support motherhood.

I’m not saying that all uses of the word complex be banned from scientific writing. Far from it, in fact, there are even degree programs in Complexity Science, studying complex systems that are composed of many parts. But there, the term is well defined and used for a specific meaning.

I don’t believe it is our job as scientists to say something is complex. I believe it is our job to make order out of the complexity that we don’t understand.

(Image from chewychunks.wordpress.com)

I just finished reading a new book Writing Science: How to Write Papers That Get Cited and Proposals That Get Funded by Prof. Joshua Schimel, in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology at UC Santa Barbara.

Schimel’s book is the perfect companion to Eloquent Science. Whereas Eloquent Science provides guidance about how to write better science, Writing Science provides more specific information about how to employ that guidance, along with plenty of worked examples. Along the way, he provides some great insights into the scientific writing process. Some of my favorite quotes follow.

It is the author’s job to make the reader’s job easy. (p. 5)

Do you write “Smith (2003) found X” or do you write “X occurs (Smith 2003)”? The former tells a story about Smith and what she did; the latter, about nature and how it works. If you write the former, you are probably doing a data dump, collecting the information that seems relevant and writing it down, without synthesizing it and integrating it into a story or framing a knowledge gap. The important information is almost never that Smith found it; it is almost always what she found. So why make Smith the subject of the sentence? (p. 56)

Within a sentence, showing action is the job of verbs and it’s an important job. Good writers use their verbs well, imbuing their papers with life. Bad writers use them poorly, stealing energy from the story, leaving it dull and listless. (p. 133)

Doing science is inherently an act of both confidence and humility. Confidence in developing your own ideas and data, doing the work knowing it may fail, and then putting it out in public where people can criticize it (and you). Humility in that you know that those data and ideas are imperfect and incomplete, and you have to admit openly to the limitations. Too much confidence can blind you to the limitations; too much humility can blind you to the accomplishments. Getting the balance between confidence and humility right is one of the greatest challenges all developing scientists face, in both doing and writing science. (p. 190).

“Publish or perish” may be the basis for survival, but it is not the basis for success. (p. 206)

If you are interesting in developing your writing to a deeper level than Eloquent Science goes into, Writing Science is the perfect book for you. I am aware of no other book on the market that presents this essential information so effectively and so clearly.

Full disclosure: Prof. Schimel wrote a positive review on amazon.com about Eloquent Science.

I can speak for myself only, but it seems to me that if you send a high-quality scientific manuscript to a British journal using American English (or an American journal using British English), then, the reviewers and editor are unlikely to reject the manuscript because you spelled “favour” as “favor”. They may ask you to convert the manuscript the best you can, which is certainly not unreasonable. In the event they don’t, most quality journals with decent copyediting will make the conversion for you. Nevertheless, it doesn’t hurt to do your best before submission.

Remember: when in Rome, do as the Romans do!

Here are a set of resources that you might find useful.

The instructions to Authors Web site for your target journal. Usually the journal may provide some instructions to the authors about style. In any case, emulate the papers that you see published in your target journal.

Oxford Dictionary for Scientific Writers and Editors

The Oxford Style Manual

Fowler’s Modern English Usage

And for Brits publishing in American journals:
Scientific Style And Format: The CSE Manual for Authors, Editors, And Publishers (CSE, Scientific Style and Format)

Thanks to Michelle at Corporate Writing Pro for some of the suggestions above. Image from <http://www.enduringamerica.com>.

The book I most highly recommend is “Don’t Be Such a Scientist”.
<http://eloquentscience.com/2010/01/quotes-from-dont-be-such-a-scientist/>
<http://www.dontbesuchascientist.com/>

The author definitely has an American way of writing, so nonnative American English speakers may miss some of the humor and subtlety in there, but the message is clear.

Here is another link that you may find helpful.
http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110126/full/469445a.html

Check out pages 19-21 in this document. Although it is directed at communicating with Congressional staff members, it is as concise a statement about how scientists need to communicate to nonscientists as I have found.
http:nufo.org/meetings/files/2006_Deborah_Koolbeck.pdf

Above all, eliminate technical and scientific jargon words from the text. Nearly everything can be explained in plain language that the public would understand. For example, instead of “lightning activity”, say “thunderstorms”. Instead of “extratropical cyclone”, say “an area of low pressure”. Or, if you use the term “extratropical cyclone” in your text, explain it as “a region of low atmospheric pressure often accompanied by rain, snow, and strong winds.”

(Image from bi.edu)

The Smithsonian magazine’s March 2012 issue has an article written by Teller, available online. In the article, Teller explains seven principles for how magicians convince the audience of the trick. After reading them, I think many could be equally applied to convincing your audience through the written or spoken word. For example:

2. Make the secret a lot more trouble than the trick seems worth. You will be fooled by a trick if it involves more time, money and practice than you (or any other sane onlooker) would be willing to invest. My partner, Penn, and I once produced 500 live cockroaches from a top hat on the desk of talk-show host David Letterman. To prepare this took weeks. We hired an entomologist who provided slow-moving, camera-friendly cockroaches (the kind from under your stove don’t hang around for close-ups) and taught us to pick the bugs up without screaming like preadolescent girls. Then we built a secret compartment out of foam-core (one of the few materials cockroaches can’t cling to) and worked out a devious routine for sneaking the compartment into the hat. More trouble than the trick was worth? To you, probably. But not to magicians.

I could translate this for scientific writers in making the manuscript flow smoothly and the figures legible. Text that is easy to read doesn’t write itself; it takes a lot of effort. Also, often the most clear figure is the one created without the default settings in the software.

(Image by AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

Warner, T. T., 2011: Quality assurance in atmospheric modeling. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 92, 1601–1610. http://dx.doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-11-00054.1 [PDF]

1. Clearly define the scientific or practical objective.

2. Identify and develop a physical understanding of the atmospheric processes that must be accurately simulated.

3. Perform a thorough analysis of all available observations.

4. Prepare an experimental design.

5. Define the required horizontal and vertical resolutions of the model.

6. Avoid the tendency to prematurely run the model, before the above-listed steps have been completed.

7. Choose the model start time and the method of model initialization to allow for spin-up of the physical processes of interest.

8. Run test simulations of evaluate the sensitivity of model solution to the computation domain size.

9. Define the most appropriate physical process parameterizations.

10. Understand the limitations to the predictability of the phenomena being modeled.

11. Establish a verification plan before the model is run and perform a thorough verification, using appropriate metrics, of the model solution using all available observations.

12. Be well organized in maintaining a detailed experimental log and the files of model code and output.

13. Use good coding practices and well-documented and well-tested software.

14. Employ open-source software tools to improve the efficiency of the modeling process.

This paper follows from Warner’s 1997 tutorial on lateral boundary conditions.

Warner, T. T., R. A. Peterson, and R. E. Treadon, 1997: A Tutorial on Lateral Boundary Conditions as a Basic and Potentially Serious Limitation to Regional Numerical Weather Prediction. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 78, 2599–2617. [PDF]

Warner’s paper is also a natural companion to my paper on how to write effective case studies in meteorology.

Schultz, D. M., 2010: How to research and write effective case studies in meteorology. Electronic J. Severe Storms Meteor., 5 (2), 1-18. [PDF]

There is also complementary material in Chapter 18 in Eloquent Science.