How to Research and Write Effective Case Studies in Meteorology

If you write or review case studies, this open-access article at the Electronic Journal of Severe Storms Meteorology provides 16 tips about how to research and write an effective case study. Schultz, D. M., 2010: How to research and write effective case studies in meteorology. Electronic J. Severe Storms Meteor., 5 (2), 1-18.

Publishing the Same Work in Two Languages

In one of the workshops I was teaching, I was asked whether it was acceptable to publish the same article twice in two different languages. I was a bit stumped as to what to say. Keith Seitter, the Executive Director of the American Meteorological Society, was able to provide a great answer to this question. […]

Forecasters Forum

The journal Weather and Forecasting (a sister journal to Monthly Weather Review, the journal for which I serve as Chief Editor) has a department called Forecasters Forum. It is a department allowing anyone (not just forecasters) to hold “discussions of forecasting problems and solutions” (Burpee and Snellman 1986). In a Forecasters Forum article, authors are […]

Use of first person in writing (a cross-disciplinary thought experiment)

I recently attended a workshop on writing across the disciplines at the University of Manchester run by Alex Baratta. The group spent a lot of time discussing how each of our own disciplines uses the first person in academic writing. After the discussion went on for a while, I offered the following model. What does […]

Book Review: How Not to Write a Novel

How Not to Write a Novel: 200 Classic Mistakes and How to Avoid Them–A Misstep-by-Misstep Guide The cover of the book (British version) caught my eye. Then the title. Then the tagline: “200 mistakes to avoid at all costs if you ever want to get published.” I was curious about how many lessons could be […]

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

On “Breaking the Rules”

The more I lecture on the importance of good communication and the more I point people to what I think are good scientific communication styles, the last thing I would want would be for some people to take these recommendations too seriously. Although I seem to offer such “rules” in my book, in my workshops, […]

Bob the Angry Flower speaks out against improper apostrophe use

Or, in color: Buy the poster here!

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 […]

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