A selection of links I found interesting from around the web
1) How to write about your science from SciDev.Net
2) Rob Hopkins from Transition Towns writes about the tension between creating change and activism in Transition and activism: a response on Transition Culture.
3) How the distant and dispersed people of Canada’s First Nations are using Facebook from Vancouver’s the Tyee.
4) How climate change will increase coastal accessibility but decrease accessibility to the interior of the Arctic by cutting ice roads. Toronto Globe and Mail reports on new research in Nature Climate Change (doi:10.1038/nclimate1120).
5) Why more immigration means less crime. The Walrus reports on how immigration lowers crime rates in Canadian communities in an article Arrival of the Fittest.
6) The Globe and Mail reports on how in Toronto carless recent immigrants are producing a more walkable environment.
Danish biology professor Kaj Sand-Jensen has a new Oikos paper (2007 – 116: 723-727) which provides advice on How to write consistently boring scientific literature:
A Scandinavian professor has told me an interesting story. The first English manuscript prepared by one of his PhD students had been written in a personal style, slightly verbose but with a humoristic tone and thoughtful side-tracks. There was absolutely no chance, however, that it would meet the strict demands of brevity, clarity and impersonality of a standard article. With great difficulty, this student eventually learned the standard style of producing technical, boring and impersonal scientific writing, thus enabling him to write and defend his thesis successfully.
I recalled the irony in this story from many discussions with colleges, who have been forced to restrict their humor, satire and wisdom to the tyranny of jargon and impersonal style that dominates scientific writing. Personally, I have felt it increasingly difficult to consume the steeply growing number of hardly digestible original articles. It has been a great relief from time to time to read and write essays and books instead.
Because science ought to be fun and attractive, particularly when many months of hard work with grant applications, data collections and calculations are over and everything is ready for publishing the wonderful results, it is most unfortunate that the final reading and writing phases are so tiresome.
I have therefore tried to identify what characteristics make so much of our scientific writing unbearably boring, and I have come up with a top-10 list of recommendations for writing consistently boring publications.
- Avoid focus
- Avoid originality and personality
- Write long contributions
- Remove implications and speculations
- Leave out illustrations
- Omit necessary steps of reasoning
- Use many abbreviations and terms
- Suppress humor and flowery language
- Degrade biology to statistics
- Quote numerous papers for trivial statements
Via Erik Andersson.
Navigating the surprises of the anthropocene