Image: Lemon zest, © Didriks via flickr.com CC BY 2.0 I hate lemon zest.  Yes, that’s trivial; but I’m going to turn it into a point that (I think) matters. I hated lemon zest even more when I was growing up.  My mother, on the other hand, loved the stuff.  She put it in everything […]

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This is a guest post by Greg Crowther, of Everett Community College, in Everett, Washington, and it’s the latest installment in my “How I learned to write” series. Image: Greg performing “Have Yourself a Healthy Little Kidney” for the University of Washington Division of Nephrology (2017). Take it away, Greg: As a reader of this […]

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Image: William Caxton showing his printing press to King Edward IV and Queen Elizabeth (public domain) It’s a phrase that gets no respect: “nearly significant”.  Horrified tweets, tittering, and all the rest – a remarkably large number of people are convinced that when someone finds P = 0.06 and utters the phrase “nearly significant”, it […]

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Photo:  This meeting will never end; courtesy Rylee Isitt. Warning: I sat through a frustrating meeting last week.  And now you’re going to hear about it. We all hate meetings.  And yet, at the same time, we love calling meetings.  In academia, at least, they’re part of the very foundation of our organizations, which we […]

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My home department’s Fall 2018 seminar series wraps up soon, and I’m looking forward to next semester’s.  We’ve got an interesting lineup of speakers with lots of variety, and I’m very grateful to our seminar organizers for that.  Today’s question: who were those organizers?  And who should they be? Across University departments I’ve visited or […]

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This is a guest post by JC Cahill, of the Department of Biology at the University of Alberta. Steve is an old friend from grad school, and just yesterday [as I write] he gave a well-received lecture on writing, here at the University of Alberta.  The enthusiasm and interest expressed by our early career scientists […]

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Statistical Inference as Severe Testing: How to Get Beyond the Statistics Wars, by Deborah G. Mayo.  Cambridge University Press, 2018. If there’s one thing we can all agree on about statistics, it’s that there are very few things we all agree on about statistics.  The “statistics wars” that Deborah Mayo would like to help us […]

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Two weeks ago, I reported my run-in with a reviewer who wanted me to scrub common English contractions (like it’s, doesn’t, or we’re) from a manuscript.  There’s a common belief that contractions mustn’t be used in scientific writing, although the genesis of this “rule” is unclear.  So is the rationale.  One that’s commonly suggested is […]

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Image: Deadline, by geralt CC 0 via pixabay.com. Warning: I’m a bit grumpy today. I’m back tilting at one of my favourite windmills today: requests for manuscript reviews with unreasonably short deadlines.  I’ve explained elsewhere that one should expect the process of peer review to take a while.  Journals would love to compress the process […]

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Image: In the Chasm of Despair (crop), Gavster CC 0 via pixabay.com.  Happy Hallowe’en?  Warning: it’s not clear whether I’m using metaphor here, or whether metaphor, having taken full control, is using me. In nearly every writing project I take on – no matter whether it’s an 800-word blog post or an 80,000-word book – […]

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