When to use north arrows on maps
February 25, 2010 Filed under Blog, Presentations, Writing
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 […]
Bob the Angry Flower speaks out against improper apostrophe use
Or, in color: Buy the poster here!
Arial is a cheap imitation of Helvetica
February 16, 2010 Filed under Blog, Posters, Presentations, Writing
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
February 16, 2010 Filed under Blog, Posters, Presentations, Writing
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 […]
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 […]
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 instability, and inertial […]
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 […]
Quotes from Don’t Be Such a Scientist
January 19, 2010 Filed under Blog, Presentations, Writing
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 communicate to […]
New Year’s resolutions to make for 2010
January 5, 2010 Filed under Blog, Presentations, Writing
If you want to make two resolutions for 2010, here’s what I recommend. One for scientific presentations: I will not start my talks with an “Outline” slide. Instead, I will motivate my talk with something to grab the attention of the audience and get them interested in what I am about to say. Read more […]
Outtake chapter: Incorporating Communication Skills into Teaching
I had written a chapter for Eloquent Science entitled “Incorporating Communication Skills into Teaching.” This chapter was later dropped as too tangential to the topics focused on in the book. Although I never completed writing that chapter, I felt that the draft might be useful to others, so I make it available here. Incorporating Communication […]
