Hot under the collar about “hot temperatures”
The December 2009 issue of the journal Weather published by the Royal Meteorological Society has a letter by David Pedgley, referring to a 2005 letter by Malcolm Walker, which refers to an earlier letter by John Cook. At issue? “Hot temperatures.” Read an excerpt from Pedgley’s letter: Temperature is a measure of the heat content […]
“Redefining the peer-review literature”
Amid all the public commentary over the stolen University of East Anglia emails, what hasn’t been as widely discussed is that ever since the internet became a tool for mass communication, scientists have been redefining what the peer-review literature is.
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 […]
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 […]
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
Should I Write Multiple-Part Papers?
As editor and reviewer, I am often confronted by authors writing multiple-part manuscripts—linked manuscripts that have the titles something like this: “The Springfield Blizzard on 12 November 1978. Part 1: Observations” “The Springfield Blizzard on 12 November 1978. Part 2: Modeling.” These types of manuscripts rarely review well. Reviewers typically offer suggestions on where bloated […]
Quotes from Experts on Effective Scientific Writing
When I was writing Eloquent Science, I solicited my friends and colleagues for quotes to put in the book. I wanted the readers to get more than just my opinion about how to communicate effectively. So, I asked the community for other tips that I might have missed. I received more quotes than I could […]
