About a year ago, I posted some basic information about my new book, coauthored with the brilliant Bethann Garramon Merkle. It’s time for an update: as books grow up, they change and presumably improve. The book is now in production (with the University of Chicago Press, for release in Fall 2025). It has a new...

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“Writing Advice is a Lie”, opines Henry Oliver on Substack, with an argument that writers (of fiction mostly, I think?) should ignore all the writing advice that surrounds them on the grounds that “Almost all of it is wrong. Flat wrong. Plain wrong. Waste-of-time wrong”. As you can imagine, this took me a little bit...

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Last week I wrote about the impossibility of deciding on the single best way to write anything – because readers differ, and what works well for one reader will work poorly for another. (Don’t panic, this isn’t a completely nihilistic position. There’s definitely bad, good, and better writing; there just isn’t best.) There’s an interesting...

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What’s the best way to write your next paper – or, to ask a simpler question, the best way to construct your title, write the opening sentence of your Introduction, or plot the pivotal data set? The bad news is that there isn’t a best way. The good news is exactly the same. When I...

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A couple of months ago, I reviewed Jason Roberts’s new book Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life. It’s the story of two eighteen-century naturalists, Carl Linnaeus and Georges-Louis Leclerc, the Comte de Buffon, and their contrasting approaches to studying biology. In a nutshell, Linnaeus was looking for structure and...

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In our new book on teaching and mentoring scientific writing, we’ve included a chapter considering the use of so-called “AI” tools in scientific writing. (“AI” writing tools such as ChatGPT are better called LLMs, or “large language models”, and I’ll make that switch right now.) It’s an unavoidable topic these days; students are using LLMs...

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Thanks to a tweet from PJ Liesch, I now know about the “stupid treehopper”, Carynota stupida. Some Latin names are wonderful. Some roll off the tongue. Some have fascinating or poignant stories behind them. Some teach us interesting and important lessons about the history and culture of science. And some are hilarious. Then there’s Carynota...

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It’s tempting, and easy, to reminisce about the good old days. The world was better when we were young (except in all the ways it wasn’t), and it was even better in the Golden Age before we joined it (except, again, in all the ways it wasn’t). You can spend as many hours as you...

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Warning: ridiculously long post – but it’s mostly the writing samples and you can skim those. In connection with my forthcoming book on teaching and mentoring scientific writers, I’ve been doing some thinking about how to harness the potential of ChatGPT and other “large language models” in teaching.* I reflected just the other week on...

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We’re excited: our new book (“our” meaning Steve with Bethann Garramon Merkle) has been formally accepted by the University of Chicago Press, and is now headed into production. So today, an update, and a request for your opinions about its title. “What book?”, you might be asking. Darn – we tried to pester folks so...

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