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 … read more

Communicating Your Ideas-NERC

I was recently awarded a grant from NERC (UK Natural Environment Research Council) along with two colleagues at the University of Manchester. I was impressed on several fronts.
1) I believe one of the reasons that the proposal was funded was because of the strong “impacts” section that we wrote where we would convey our … read more

What Climategate means for scientists and their emails

The so-called Climategate scandal in which hacked emails from the University of East Anglia Center for Climate Research were released to the public is a sad day for public confidence in science. (I hesitate to use the term Climategate as the similarity with Watergate is 180 degrees opposite. Whereas the burglars in Watergate … read more

“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.

PowerPoint Tricks You May Not Have Heard About

Microsoft PowerPoint is so pervasive, yet discovering little tricks to assist your presentation are out there. Here is a list of the ones I find most useful or have great potential to be put to use by speakers.

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 text needs to … read more

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 … read more

Excerpt: Chapter 3: Writing an Effective Title

This is an excerpt from Chapter 3: Writing an Effective Title.