Images: A field crew disappearing into the forest; field sites and gear for our soil-carbon project.  All © Stephen Heard CC BY 4.0 Warning: long and detailed – but the details are really the point, so don’t give up too quickly. I called this blog Scientist Sees Squirrel in recognition of my lack of an […]

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Image: Jackdaw by ivabalk, CC0 via pixabay.com Research for my new book has had me reading a lot of books about the history of natural history. Some are well known, some are obscure; some are old; some are new. (Some were borrowed, and this time around, one was blue.)  Here are four more minireviews (in no […]

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Image: a snippet of the (excellent) copyedit for my forthcoming book. Over the last six months, I’ve had several pieces of writing go through the copyediting process: a few papers, and one book.  Over my career, I’ve seen closer to 100 pieces of writing through copyedits.  It’s a stage of publication that was, for a […]

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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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