Images: The red admiral butterfly, Vanessa atalanta; © Kristian Peters, CC BY-SA 3.0. Portrait, “Vanessa”, 1868, by John Everett Millais, collection of Sudley House, Liverpool; public domain. Last week I shipped off the final revision of my forthcoming book, The Strangest Tribute: How Scientific Names Celebrate Adventurers, Heroes, and Even a Few Scoundrels.*  You know […]

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Image: Western meadowlark singing, © Jim Kennedy via flickr.com, CC BY 2.0 I’ve argued recently that our scientific literature is tedious to read in part because it lacks voice – those hints of individuality in vocabulary, style, and structure that show personality and mark one writer’s work as distinct from another’s.  I’ve also thought a bit […]

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Warning: wonkish. Also long (but there’s a handy jump). Over the course of a career, you become accustomed to reviewers raising strange objections to your work.  As sample size builds, though, a few strange objections come up repeatedly – and that’s interesting.  Today: the bizarre notion that one shouldn’t do significance testing with simulation data. […]

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Image: European red squirrel, © Yvonne Findlay, used by permission. Inspired by similar exercises from Small Pond Science and The Lab and Field, I present once more a few of the more interesting search terms by which Scientist Sees Squirrel has been found.  These are all real, I swear!   turdus “Yeah?  Well, I’m rubber, […]

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Image: European starling by hedera.baltica via flickr.com; CC BY-SA 2.0 A few weeks ago, I argued that unlike fiction writing, scientific writing largely lacks “voice”.  By “voice”, I mean recognizable attributes of text, such as rhythm, vocabulary, style, and other  that makes a particular author’s text unique and that suggest the author’s attitude or personality.  […]

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Image: Ambrose Palisot de Beauvois (public domain). Writing my forthcoming book has taken me down a lot of rabbitholes.  Many of them have involved the history of science, and especially, the history of natural history.  I’ve learned about naturalists who were heroic and naturalists who were despicable; naturalists who were centuries ahead of their times […]

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Warning: if you had your fill of ‘use’ vs. ‘utilize’ last week, I won’t blame you for clicking away. Here, this post is kind of fun and I promise it’s not about semantics. Last week I let myself rant a little bit about one of my writing pet peeves, the overuse of utilize when use will […]

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(My Writing Pet Peeves, Part 5.) Last week, in a moment of grading-related frustration, I suggested on Twitter that there is never any good reason to use the word “utilize”.  As scientists, we love to use it – and I’ll have more to say about that below – but my claim is that in every […]

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Image: The Writer in the Window, by Mark Heybo via flickr.com, CC BY 2.0 Scientific writing has a reputation for being dull (among other things).  By and large, it deserves that reputation (although there are admittedly exceptions).  I’ve become very interested in why our writing is dull.  I don’t have a definitive answer, but in […]

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Image: an Enigma encoding/decoding machine (Greg Goebel, CC 0 via Wikimedia.org).  Which, I admit, is only tangentially related to this piece, but it’s pretty cool. I’ve celebrated many a Latin name on Scientist Sees Squirrel, sometimes for something as simple as the way it sounds, but more often for a story it tells.  But this […]

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