Cleveland Abbe’s “The Teacher and the Student” (1909)

This short essay was published in Monthly Weather Review in January 1909, as part of the Summary of 1908 (p. 453). The text is copied verbatim, including what we would now recognize as non-gender-neutral language and grammatical errors. THE TEACHER AND THE STUDENT The good work that is done in meteorology is often accomplished by […]

Advice on providing better feedback…

Our advisors coated the drafts of our writing in red ink. And, we, in turn, coat the drafts of our students’ writing in red ink. Does the volume of red ink challenge students to improve their writing, or do they just shrug it off (for any number of reasons)? I was just reading an article […]

Dan Keyser’s Edward Lorenz Teaching Excellence Award Speech: Words of Wisdom for Teachers

Daniel Keyser’s Acceptance Speech for the 2014 Edward N. Lorenz Teaching Excellence Award I never expected to receive an award for teaching, let alone an award named after Ed Lorenz. I offer my heartfelt thanks to my former and current students who nominated me for the Lorenz Award and to the Selection Committee for conferring […]

Are students prepared for university-level writing?

Kim Brooks has this essay “Death to High School English” published in Salon.com. She details her experiences with finding students who don’t know the basics of writing: composition, structure, thesis statements, grammar, punctuation, and plagiarism. My own experiences here in the UK with final-year environmental-science majors were remarkably similar to hers, so the problem isn’t […]

English Communication for Scientists

The journal Nature has on its Scitable page a link to an online book English Communication for Scientists by Dr. Jean-luc Doumont (that’s him on the right). I haven’t read through it all, but it seems to have mostly good advice, albeit a bit short. The online book has six units: Communicating as a Scientist […]

Teaching Scientific Communication Skills – BAMS article

My experiences teaching a scientific communications laboratory course based on Eloquent Science is described in a recent article published in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society. Schultz, D. M., 2010: A university laboratory course to improve scientific communication skills. Bull. Amer. Meteor. Soc., 91, 1259–1266, ES25–34. Download the article here, along with its Electronic […]

Prof. Rob Fovell (UCLA) on PowerPoint and Teaching

I do not use PowerPoint in class. PowerPoint is virtually a necessity for scientific talks, but I think they often hurt classroom lectures. They lock me into a particular order, and they tend to make me go through material too fast. My handwriting is poor, but I write in class so I don’t go too […]

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 […]

A course to improve scientific and communication skills

Here is the abstract of the talk that I will be giving at the AMS Annual Meeting in Atlanta about the 14-week university course that I designed based on the book Eloquent Science. To improve writing skills, a student needs to write more and write more often. Thus, I tried to minimize the lecture material […]