“Utilize” versus “Use”
December 18, 2012 Filed under Blog, Featured, Uncategorized, Writing
From The Telegraph (sent to me by Jamie Gilmour): When the American writer David Foster Wallace died four years ago, he left behind the following fragments: notes towards a dictionary all of his own. Utilize A noxious puff-word. Since it does nothing that good old use doesn’t do, its extra letters and syllables don’t make […]
Automation of literature reviews
A recently published paper in Scientometrics raises the specter of an automated tool that would search through existing citations and “facilitate novices to perform tasks that are usually carried out by trained professionals.” The tool was then used for students to create literature reviews and these were submitted to conferences. The tool was so successful, […]
Avoid hyperbole in scientific writing.
Hyperbole can take many different forms. Nearly all should be avoided in scientific writing. Avoid calling previous work “pioneering”, “novel”, or “foundational”, unless it truly is. Don’t call a study “comprehensive.” They rarely are. Don’t say that you’ve conducted “detailed work.” You’re a scientist. You’re supposed to do detailed work. Avoid absolutes like “never”, “always”, […]
Oh, snap! A dig at a badly written introduction
An unfortunate order of words
A quote from Sports Minister Hugh Robertson, from this article. “The British themselves are pretty stoic; there is a long tradition of watching sport in rain macs or listening to Cliff Richard or whatever.” Come on. Cliff Richard isn’t that bad.
Deep thoughts about editing
Not sure where I found this, but it’s classic!
An abstract that says nothing
This abstract comes from a recently published in an atmospheric science journal: Previous studies have shown that numerical diffusion plays a crucial role in the ability of mesoscale models to reproduce features similar to sub-meso motions found in observations, particularly in terms of spectral energy distribution. In this study, the impacts of surface heterogeneity and […]
“Cold” equivalent potential temperature?
As scientists, we need to be precise in our writing. Evgeni Fedorovich at the University of Oklahoma has tried to keep me honest about writing about “cold temperatures”. Know that the air can be “cold” or “warm”, but temperatures are “high” or “low.” I want to take this argument one step further. It makes no […]
Past or Present Tense?
Which is correct? A. Wetzel et al. (2004) show a negative correlation between snow density and air temperature that explains 52% of the variance. B. Wetzel et al. (2004) showed a negative correlation between snow density and air temperature that explains 52% of the variance. The difference is that A uses the present tense “show”, […]
The importance of proper citation
Just recently I discovered a published article that neglected to cite the whole field of the topic that they were investigating. The article did have citations to the statistical methods and other papers that were related to their work, but not a single paper had been cited that had performed the same statistical analyses that […]
