Image: Storytelling chair © BeyondTimelines, CC-0 via pixabay.com There are plenty of strong opinions and controversies about scientific writing: the active voice vs. the passive, how to describe a result with P = 0.06, even – and perhaps most spectacular for ratio of strength of feeling to importance – one space or two after a […]

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Image: Don’t feed the trolls, © Sam Fentress CC BY-SA 3.0; plus integration by parts. I’m usually pleased when people read my blog posts and ask questions about them.  Usually – but not when they’re trolls. I ran into a very-likely-troll a couple of weeks ago.  I’d written a post I called Charles Darwin’s Other […]

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If I have a shortcoming as a writer – and believe me, the only thing wrong with that proposition is that I don’t just have one – it’s my fondness for parentheticals.  (See what I did there?)  I love them; as I say in The Scientist’s Guide to Writing, “I use parentheses as if I’d […]

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I don’t usually blog about my own papers, except in some rather meta ways, but last week saw the publication of a paper I’m really, really proud of.  And it has some interesting backstory, including its conception right here on Scientist Sees Squirrel. The paper is called “Site-selection bias and apparent population declines in long-term […]

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(My Writing Pet Peeves, Part 6) Over the last two weeks, I’ve written peer reviews* for three different manuscripts (MSs).  All three included newly coined acronyms (NCAs) to substitute for repeated short technical phrases (RSTPs).  I’ve gotten in the habit, whenever I run across an NCA, to use my word processor’s search function (WPSF) to […]

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Images: Charles Darwin, age 33 (with his son William Erasmus Darwin), public domain; Leucospermum bolusii, photo by Andrew Massyn, released to public domain. When I was a grad student, it was de rigeur to proclaim that every good idea was already in The Origin of Species, and to express amazement that Charles Darwin could have […]

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Image: Sun Records compilation; photo © Chris Light CC BY-SA 4.0 Most scientific papers (and definitely most of mine) are pretty dull.  That is, the results may be important and interesting, but the papers themselves – the text – tend to be dry, colourless, even tedious.  That’s partly because we work so hard to remove […]

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Image: Smokestacks © Dori via Wikimedia.org CC BY-SA 3.0 Canada has a new carbon tax – far too modest, but it’s a start.  Its implementation is an awkward mosaic across the country, but in my province of New Brunswick, it’s a federal tax* that’s coupled with a rebate (or “climate action incentive”, as it’s confusing […]

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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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