Top 40 potential questions to be asked in a PhD viva or defense

Students worry about their vivas. They wonder whether they need to do additional work or read textbooks and articles again. For most students, they don’t need to do all this. My advice has consistently been the following to prepare for your viva: Pick up dissertation a few days before the viva, and read through it […]

Editorial: How to Be a More Effective Author

Looking for top tips from the editors of Monthly Weather Review on how to be a more effective author?  The November 2022 issue has an editorial by the 21 editors with our top tips from planning the paper, writing the paper, addressing a rejected manuscript, and responding to reviewers and editors. In addition, we have […]

Chinese translation of Eloquent Science now available

Thanks to the hard work of colleagues, there is a Chinese-language translation of Eloquent Science now available. A huge thank you to translators Haijiang Kong, Yan Han, Feimiao Zhao, M. Song, and Jidong Gao, who worked hard over many years to get this out. I am especially grateful to Haijiang who was the one who […]

Handout: Common Errors in Student Science Writing

For many years, I have compiled a list of common errors that my students have made in writing scientific papers. I have printed it out and handed it out to several cohorts of first-year undergraduate students over the past few years. I hope this short guide to student writing has helped them improve. It’s been […]

Eloquent Science Workshops for Your Organization

I am delivering online and in-person workshops on scientific-communication skills designed specifically for your needs.

Errata from Eloquent Science

Here is a list of typos identified by the compositor of the book. These changes were not implemented at the time.   p. 53, 1st graph: OK to change “formating” to “formatting”? p. 53, 3rd graph: OK to change “conciousness” to “consciousness”? p. 86, 3rd graph of section 9.8: OK to change “parenthethical” to “parenthetical”? […]

New resource for teaching students how to find, read, and use the literature

The UK Higher Education Academy just published our second report in the series How to Succeed at University in GEES Disciplines: Enhancing Student’s Information Literacy Skills. (GEES is Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences.) I wrote this with coauthor Rich Waller at Keele University. Contents include finding and assessing scientific literature, critical reading, citing sources and […]

Effective use of colors in meteorological visualizations

A new paper has appeared in the Early Online Releases at the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. This paper is entitled,

Twenty tips for interpreting scientific claims

This Comment in Nature today by William Sutherland, David Spiegelhalter, and Mark Burgman is meant as a primer for policy makers who need to interpret science, but I would argue that this primer is also useful for scientists who might fall into this trap of overinterpreting or misinterpreting results in their own or others’ studies. […]

Eloquent Science: Chapter 11 Figures

I received a request from a professor who uses Eloquent Science in the classroom. He wanted the figures from Chapter 11: Figures and Tables, so that he could adapt them into his own presentations. In response to that request, here they are, in a single PowerPoint file: Eloquent Science: Figures from Chapter 11

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