Bad Writing and Bad Thinking

Russ Schumacher pointed me to this article from the The Chronicle of Higher Education: “Bad Writing and Bad Thinking” by Rachel Toor. Call me simple-minded, call me anti-intellectual, but I believe that most poor scholarly writing is a result of bad habits, of learning tricks of the academic trade as a way to try to […]

Bob The Angry Flower: It’s vs Its

A great title (Bryan 2005)

I was recently reminded of this paper by my colleague George Bryan. Bryan, G. H., 2005: Spurious convective organization in simulated squall lines owing to moist absolutely unstable layers. Mon. Wea. Rev., 133, 1978–1997. I love this title. This title has all of Lipton’s five characteristics of an effective title. Informative The title has all […]

Appropriate way to label axes of graphs

Prof. Brian Fiedler of the University of Oklahoma recently published an article in Physics Education calling for a change in direction in teaching dimensionless ratios in physics. As he advocates, The tick marks [on an axis of a graph] are pure numbers. Labels with a solidus such as R/µm are orthodox notation for what the […]

The range of reviewer recommendations from crocs to pigeons

Explains the evolutionary line of Rejectosaurus. From the A(frican) Blog of Ecology by Raf Aerts: “I’ve just spotted a Revisosaurus major on one of my manuscripts, even though the field characteristics were very close to those of a Rejectosaurus resubmittens (see Fig. 1, blue line).”

Bob the Angry Flower speaks out against improper apostrophe use

Or, in color: Buy the poster here!

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 […]

Book Will Be Available on 23 November

If printing and shipping goes well, the AMS will start selling the book on 23 November.

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