Lead Sentence of the Week honors go to Alister Doyle of Reuters, whose news report begins: Indigenous Sami peoples in the Arctic may have found a way to help their reindeer herds cope with climate change: more castration. (Thanks to investigator John Karp for bringing this to our attention.) Further detail appears in a pair […]
Tag: writing
How to tell a story
Tim Radford, science editor of the Guardian ’til recently, mastered the art of telling a gripping, good story — no matter how tough the topic. One day Tim wrote some notes about how to do it. Here’s the start of his “Manifesto for the simple scribe” (to see the whole list, click on the link): […]
Teich’s take: The dulling down of scientific reports
Albert H. Teich, a director at the American Association for the Advancement of Science, suggests the capacity to be dull is an evolutionary adaptation for self-preservation. “If your article is boring, no one will read it,” says Teich. He says a recent study in Physics World found 90 per cent of all scientific papers are […]
The fallacy of examples: an example
Yes, I am a goat-giver, and proud of it. But— I’ve noticed in business writing in particular the frequency of what we can call the Fallacy of Examples (a type of Fallacy of Hasty Generalization). You read some story about a successful CEO as if we should learn from his (yes, usually it’s a him) […]