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 … read more

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 … read more

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 … read more

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 … read more

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 … read more

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 … read more