Image: Books 5 – 9 in Louise Penny’s Three Pines series, featuring Armand Gamache. “I don’t know. I was wrong. I’m sorry”.  Lacoste recited them slowly, lifting a finger to count them off. “I need help”, the Chief said, completing the statements.  The ones he’d taught young Agent Lacoste many years ago.  The ones he […]

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Image: “It was a dark and stormy night…”, from Edward George Bulwer-Lytton’s novel Paul Clifford (1830).  Check out similarly wretched prose at the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. I’ve been prepping recently for two different writing workshops: one on my home campus, and another half-way across the continent at the University of Wyoming.  A funny thing happens […]

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Images: The bottles in question (© S Heard CC BY 4.0); and the video screen that sparked the question (© Alex Smith).  Warning: might be considered navel-gazing. If you’ve ever seen my office, you’ll know that it’s a disaster zone.  Piles of books, unruly sheaves of paper, empty binders and full ones, cases and boxes […]

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Image: Writing, CC 0 I teach a scientific writing course, and I think I’m doing it wrong. I don’t mean that I’m teaching my course wrong.  It might not be the course you’d teach, but I’m happy enough with it, and my students seem to be too.  What I mean, I guess, is that we’re […]

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Image: Marionette, © Thomas Quine CC BY 2.0 via flickr.com When we do science, we presumably want that science to have both impact and reach.  By “impact”, I mean more than citation counts: I mean that what we’ve done adds to human knowledge and changes how we think about, and interact with, our world.  By […]

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This is a joint post by Scott Ramsay and Steve.  The topic was Scott’s idea, and Scott (mostly) wrote the part about scare quotes.  The boring stuff at the beginning is (mostly) Steve’s. Photo: scare quotes by Scazon via flickr.com, CC BY 2.0. Quotation marks seem, on the face of it, the simplest of the […]

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Image: Blackpoll warbler (one of the declining species), © Simon Barrette CC BY-SA 3.0 via wikimedia.org You saw the headline (and maybe you read the study): three billion lost birds.  Three billion fewer birds in North America than there were in 1970.  It’s eye-catching, isn’t it?  There are (as is usually true) some reasons to […]

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Image: Polishing the chimney of a Burrell Traction Engine.  © Oast House Archives, CC BY-SA 2.0.  What? You think this is only tenuously connected to the post?  My friend, tenuous connections are my thing. One of the most exciting parts of being a mid-to-late-career researcher is seeing the scientific writing produced by the early-career researchers […]

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This is a guest post by Bastien Castagneyrol.  This is an issue I’ve thought about (as have others), and like Bastien, I don’t quite know what action to take.  I like Bastien’s climbing metaphor.  In a related one, the journey from subscriber-pays paywall to author-pays-open-access crosses a very rugged landscape, with crevasses both obvious and […]

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I’ve mentioned this before: I’m terrible at titles.  That’s why there’s been a long series of title changes for my forthcoming book.  (Look for it in March 2020, from Yale University Press.  Believe it or not, you can actually pre-order it now, but don’t worry, I’ll remind you as the publication date approaches.)  The book […]

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