Education
How to write a technical or scientific report (Dec 2025)Some guidance, mostly for science and engineering students, on how to write a scientific paper or technical report. I've updated this article slightly since I wrote it thirty years ago, to deal with the rise in web-based publication. But, frankly, I think that similar standards should apply to electronic and print reporting.
Categories: education
Fun with capital letters (Feb 2025)I frequently have to read documents that look as if the writer was given a bag of capital letters, and told to use them all up. Like many aspects of English, capitalization has few rules that are set in stone; but there are some conventions that serious writers ought to keep in mind.
Categories: education
Technical writing: what do we lose, when we write more readably? (Jan 2025)There's no shortage of guidance on writing English that people will want to read. In science and technology, however, can we apply the same guidelines without losing information?
Categories: education
Why the grammer snobs have it all wrong about the apostrophe (Nov 2023)Was there ever a golden age of the apostrophe, when everybody used it the same? No.
Categories: education
How flat-earthers use misrepresentations of scale to promote their ideas (Sep 2022)Misrepresentations of scale are common in the literature of organizations that seek to deceive. However, it's sometimes difficult, or unhelpful, to draw diagrams to scale. This article tries to explain the difference between benign and pernicious distortions of scale. I'm picking on the flat-earthers for the purposes of illustration, but the presentational devices they use are common in business and politics as well.
Categories: science and technology, education, snake oil
Why we only see one side of the moon -- the odd phenomenon of tidal locking (Apr 2022)We only see one face of the moon from the Earth, and that isn't a coincidence. The same process that causes this effect also affects other celestial bodies, often in more interesting ways.
Categories: science and technology, education
The planet Vulcan: a cautionary tale that deserves to be better known (Feb 2021)Why was the non-existent planet Vulcan so frequently sighted by astronomers in the nineteenth century, and what can contemporary scientists and science students learn from this episode?
Categories: science and technology, education
How to give a presentation (Jul 2020)Some guidance, mostly for students, on how to make a scientific or technical presentation.
Categories: education
Ten simple rules for passing an examination (Jul 2020)Advice for students on how to do well in university level examinations, fairly and honestly. There are no secrets here, but it's amazing how many students do less well than they should because they haven't understood how university teaching works.
Categories: education
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