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Tag Archives: writing

“Wait, What Am I Even Saying?” Communicating Statistics To A Wide Audience

Posted on June 14, 2021 by Sara Stoudt One comment

If we write about our statistical methods behind our ecology work, and none of our readers understand it, have we really communicated at all?

This month I’m getting meta. It’s been about a year and a half since I started writing the Stats Corner for this blog with the goal of demystifying some of the statistical methods that are used by ecologists every day. At the same time, I’ve been writing a book with Deborah Nolan called “Communicating with Data: The Art of Writing for Data Science.” The book was released this spring, so it seemed like a good time to reflect on writing about statistics accessibly.

Stats Corner

Daniella Rabaiotti: Fitting Flatulence Facts Into a PhD

Posted on November 14, 2019 by Sam Perrin 3 comments

Image Credit: Daniella Rabaiotti, CC BY 2.0, Image Cropped

A PhD can be an incredibly stressful experience for a young scientist. Time runs low, stress levels run high. Just yesterday, Nature released an article that claimed the situation could be worsening, with more than a third of PhD students surveyed globally having sought help for mental health problems related to their PhD.

Furthermore, universities often place pressure on young career researchers to publish as many journal articles as possible, despite the fact that a large number of us don’t go on into academic careers. This can often leave PhD students with little time to develop skills outside of scientific writing.

The Forefront

How You Can Help Out Ecology for the Masses

Posted on November 11, 2019 by Sam Perrin One comment

Here at Ecology for the Masses, we’re quite happy with the blog we’ve built up over the last year and a half. We’ve been able to publish three articles a week on an almost constant basis on what we think is pretty interesting content, and we’ve been rewarded with a decent readership and some great feedback from our audience.

Opinions

Dag Hessen: Communicating Science Through Children’s Literature

Posted on May 2, 2019 by Sam Perrin 3 comments

Image Credit: Akademikerne, CC BY-SA 2.0, Image Cropped

The past couple of years has seen younger generations become increasingly active with regards to environmental change. Recent protests worldwide, spearheaded by people like Greta Thunberg, have been incredibly encouraging to watch. So it’s important that scientists continue to improve our ability to communicate science to children.

On that note, I spoke to Dag Hessen, Norwegian ecologist and writer, who has published several science books, also successful children’s books. We spoke about the importance of explaining ecological concepts to children, the process of writing a book, and dealing with a different form of writing.

The Forefront

Shannon McCauley: The Role of Gender in Authorship Bias

Posted on January 24, 2019 by Adam Hasik Leave a comment

Image Credit: Breakingpic, Pexels licence, Image Cropped

Who gets the credit in scientific articles is a pressing question (covered in a previous opinion piece), and deciding how to award authorship is especially relevant given the impact that papers in high-impact journals can have on the trajectory of a scientist early in their career.

With this in mind, I spoke with Dr. Shannon McCauley of the University of Toronto-Mississauga during her November visit to the University of Arkansas (more about Shannon can be found in our previous interview). In addition to giving a talk on some of her research, Shannon also led a workshop on authorship in science. I sat down with her afterwards to talk more about the subject.

The Forefront

Who Gets the Credit?

Posted on December 20, 2018 by Adam Hasik One comment

Scientific papers nowadays are written more on computers than with ink and paper, but no matter how you write a paper it is important to distinguish who gets credit for what. (Image credit: Petar Milošević, CC BY-SA 4.0, Image Cropped)

A huge component of science is the execution of successful experiments and then writing about those experiments. Consequently, a lot of weight is put on who did what, and what kind of credit people deserve for what they do. This can result in some arguments about how much so and so did for the project, and why they deserve authorship credit. In this article, I want to briefly cover some authorship issues and what kind of impact authorship can have on a scientist’s career.