I don’t let myself complain about peer review very much.* After all, for all its occasional failures and for all the petty annoyances that can be involved, peer review usually works really well. It’s certainly improved every single one of my papers. Every one of them!.
But.
Almost a decade ago, I succumbed to temptation and wrote a post I called “The one kind of review that really gets my goat”. Continue reading
When you’re working with a developing scientific writer, you may be doing a lot of different things – but one thing you’re almost certainly doing is reading drafts and making suggestions for improvement. We’ve recently posted about how that draft-reading work can (should!) shift as the writer develops and as any particular draft develops.
Today, though, we’re looking at another angle. Whether or not you’ve had any training in mentoring earlier-career writers (and most academics haven’t – hence our book!), there’s one thing you surely can do. That thing: you know how (we all do) to look at a draft manuscript and flag things you think ought to be revised – “errors”, if you will.
The developing writers you (and we) work with are trying to master a new writing genre – scientific writing – with its attendant conventions of format, style, and content. Continue reading
This week, I’ve been deep into proofreading.* Checking proofs is an annoying bit of drudgery at the best of times, but it’s especially awful when the proofs go on and on and on – for 374 pages, in this case. Between that hint, and the photo above, you can probably figure out which proofs I’m dealing with: those for the 3rd edition of The Scientist’s Guide to Writing. And checking this set of proofs is simultaneously tedious, annoying, exciting, gratifying, and deeply weird.
It’s tedious and annoying for the obvious reasons. Continue reading
Sometimes you hear a science PhD (or a science career) described as a process of learning more and more about less and less, until eventually you know absolutely everything about nothing at all. This is funny, and it can certainly look that way from the outside, but it’s not true at all. Grad school in science prepares students for a wide range of careers in part because in the process of learning more and more about less and less, you pick up skills that translate across fields and across things you might undertake in life.
When we talk about translatable skills from (science) grad school, a few things always head the list: writing, data analysis, and time management, to start. Continue reading
What, if anything, is ecology?
You would think I’d know that – I’ve been a practicing (academic) ecologist for about 40 years. But I don’t. Sure, I know some stuff. I know that ecology isn’t the same thing as environmentalism (and the extent of overlap has been the fuel for approximately seven million beer-assisted “discussions”). I know that most textbooks offer definitions of “ecology”, usually along the lines of “the study of the distribution and abundance of living organisms”. I also know that lots of ecologists do things that don’t fit that definition (or any other) very tidily. What I don’t know is how to mold those things into an answer to “what, if anything, is ecology?” Continue reading
I’ve blogged before about the shortest scientific papers. Very short papers (a handful to a few dozen words) are usually amusing, but they’re often not very effective at communication. But I’ve just discovered a (13-year-old) heated exchange between two paleontologists, paper-response-response-response, that ends with a 2-word paper. And those 2 words are, I think, both amusing and effective.
What’s the two-word paper? Continue reading
It’s been a while since I’ve indulged myself; so today, another of my favourite Latin names. This one will echo the very first post in my long series – that for the hoopoe, Upupa epops. I love that name chiefly because it’s fun to say (go ahead; say it a few times quickly, I’ll wait). The same is true for another bird: the Eurasian wryneck, Jynx torquilla. Jynx torquilla! Upupa epops rolls off the tongue; Jynx torquilla is livelier, springing off the tongue and taking flight.
When I first ran across Jynx torquilla (the name, that is, not the bird), I was taken a bit aback by the unusual letter combination. How many Latin names, I asked myself, contain a ‘J’, a ‘Y’, an ‘X’, and a ‘Q’? Continue reading
Anybody remember MOOCs?
Maybe 10 or 15 years ago, MOOCs (“Massive Open Online Courses”) were the exciting new technology that would revolutionize education – and perhaps even kill off the university as we knew it. With a MOOC, a single star lecturer would give the definitive course on topic X, and students everywhere would learn from the MOOC. Why replicate thousands of near-identical versions of Biology 101, each taught by a local lesser light, when students could all tune in to a masterpiece by the best instructor in the world? Not only that, MOOCs would open up education to everyone. Not only wouldn’t we need local universities, we wouldn’t need universities at all, because anybody could take a course, anywhere, any time. (Even to me, it sounds like I’m exaggerating the fervour that seized some folks around MOOCs – but if anything, I’m underplaying it.)
It didn’t happen. Continue reading
This isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned it, but my book of advice for scientific writers, The Scientist’s Guide to Writing, is getting a 3rd edition! Publication is set for August 4th, 2026 – a mere six months away! Meanwhile, the publishing machinery is revving up, and today I can reveal the new cover. Continue reading
A couple of weeks ago, we offered a tool for calibrating your comments to be relevant and useful for a developing writer you’re working with, depending on the stage of development of a given draft text. But there’s another dimension along which mentoring might (should!) change over time, and that’s the development of the writer.
The topic is far too large for a single post, but to give you a head start, we can recognize two very different components of mentoring that might change as the writer develops:
Each should change as a writer builds skill and experience, but today we’ll concentrate on the former Continue reading
Scientist Sees Squirrel 