Losing Your Way
December 17, 2010 Filed under Excerpts, Uncategorized, Writing
This section is published in the October 2010 issue of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, Volume 91, p. 1416.
How to Fail in Grant Writing
Curtis Wood (Univ of Reading) sends this article from The Chronicle of Higher Education. How to Fail in Grant Writing Another in the series of “How Not To…” papers… Fourteen Ways to Say Nothing with Scientific Visualization. How to Make a Scientific Lecture Unbearable. How to Get Your Paper Rejected. How to Write Consistently Boring […]
A heretical parenthetical thought
George Bryan sent me this article from the 9 November 2010 issue of Eos. Robock, A., 2010: Parentheses are (are not) for references and clarification (saving space). Eos, 91 (45), p. 419. Prof. Robock makes a strong case that sentences like the following are not clear, and that the added space in writing the sentence […]
A title in need of some help
This paper was published in Nature Geoscience in 2008. “Recent Antarctic ice mass loss from radar interferometry and regional climate modelling” My first reaction was “If radar interferometry and regional climate modelling are causing ice mass loss, then stop it, for the Earth’s sake!” — Photograph by Tim Laman/National Geographic Society
Checklist for Statistics
I came across this statistical checklist from Nature. It details some common errors that many authors make in their manuscript, and Nature encourages authors to check this list before submission. I thought some were pretty obvious, but, then again, maybe people need to hear the obvious anyway. http://www.nature.com/nature/authors/gta/Statistical_checklist.doc Nature also has encourages additions to this […]
“Unnecessary” Quotation Marks
October 27, 2010 Filed under Blog, Uncategorized, Writing
I think people use quotation marks too often in scientific manuscripts. Be brave. Boldly define your term and use it sans quotation marks. It’s good to know that someone else thinks like me. Let me introduce you to The “Blog” of “Unnecessary” Quotation Marks.
Check your reference list!
A recent paper published in Scientometrics by Robert Lopresti looks at the accuracy of citations in the five leading environmental science journals. Lopresti found that 24.4% of the references in the reference list had errors in them. Almost half of the errors were in the authors names. Almost 30% of the errors were in the […]
Leonard Cohen on songwriting
Over the years, I’ve thought a lot about the similarities between being a musical performer and being a scientist. I was listening to Leonard Cohen on my way to work the other day, and I was reminded of an interview where he discussed his songwriting process in more depth than you normally hear from an […]
How do you get to Carnegie Hall? 10,000 Hours
Slate.com has had an interesting series of articles (two of them are here and here) about the creativity originating from working in pairs: think Lennon and McCartney, Joel and Ethan Cohen, Richards and Jagger. In the second installment, Joshua Wolf Shenk said about the two Beatles: The nature of John and Paul’s intimacy evolved over […]
10 Tips on How to Write Less Badly
I was recently in Norman, Oklahoma, to present an Eloquent Science workshop, hosted by J.J. Gourley of the NOAA/National Severe Storms Laboratory. It was a lively and enthusiastic group in attendance, and I thank everyone who participated, bought books, and talked to me afterward. It’s great to know that there’s such interest. Yesterday, J.J. sent […]
