I bet you’ve had this experience. There’s something you’re not particularly good at; you mention that fact; and someone responds by telling with “Oh, but you can do it if you try”. It’s always someone with the very best of intentions, believing that they’re being encouraging and supportive. But it’s also always someone who’s quite...

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That sound you heard last month was the “thud” of another classic evolutionary hypothesis hitting the ground, falsified. There’s nothing particularly unusual about that; despite efforts from the antiscience fringe to play “gotcha”, it’s actually a defining feature of science that we change our minds about things in light of new evidence. But this particular...

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As of this post, I’ve been inflicting Scientist Sees Squirrel on you for ten years. Ten years! This is hard for me to believe. Over that time I’ve written about 650 posts, which come to somewhere around 800,000 words of text – considerably more than War and Peace (~570,000) although not yet equaling the sum...

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I write occasional commissioned pieces for Jobs.ac.uk, and today I’m mostly pointing you to my latest one over there. The lecture gets a bad rap. It’s pretty easy to find essays deploring the whole idea of teaching via the lecture – compared to other techniques, you’ll read, it’s outdated, it’s ineffective, it’s boring. But the...

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The second edition of The Scientist’s Guide to Writing isn’t quite three years old, but I’ve been talking with the publisher about a third edition. And I want your help with it. I have to admit that thinking about a 3rd edition makes me slightly uncomfortable. I hate edition greed: the relentless production of new...

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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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