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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It’s been fascinating to see the spread of “artificial intelligence”, or more properly large language models (LLMs),* in science and in writing. It’s been even more fascinating to watch how we, as scientists and writers, are struggling to know how to think about them. That’s not surprising: the wide availability and superficially impressive performance of...

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Ah, committees… how do you get your colleagues to do the work we all know needs to be done?  Here (semi)regular contributor Greg Crowther suggests some techniques borrowed from journal editing and peer review. This fall, after years of avoiding substantial committee work, I will chair a campus committee for the first time. I didn’t...

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Jason Roberts’s Every Living Thing has perhaps the most gorgeous cover I’ve ever seen on a natural history book. That alone would have been enough for me to pick it up and look more closely – but the subtitle, The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life, is darn near irresistible. The flap copy...

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Over the dozen years or so, it seems like I’ve oriented my career more and more towards teaching and mentoring scientific writing. It’s not that I haven’t continued doing research – if anything my publication rate has picked up a little, and I think that, together with my students and collaborators, I’ve published some really...

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Warning: navel gazing This week, my campus is bustling, school buses are lumbering down the streets, and there’s that new-school-year-buzz around almost everything. People are going back to school! But, for the first time since 1969, not me, and that’s a bit weird. Yes: in September of 1970 I headed off to kindergarten, and for...

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