Ten simple rules for attending your first scientific conference

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is a useful article by Elizabeth Leininger et al. in PLoS Computational Biology for July 15, 2021 titled Ten simple rules for attending your first conference. That article is a 13-page pdf with 23 references. Their discussion includes both in-person and virtual scientific conferences, and advice for mentors. Those ten rules are:

 

Rule 1: Select a conference that aligns with your goals.

Rule 2: Find others to foot the bill.

Rule 3: Know your logistics.

Rule 4: Prepare for the environment.

Rule 5: Learn how to take in the science.

Rule 6: Make a conference strategy.

Rule 7: Make new friends but keep the old; be ready to communicate.

Rule 8: Prepare to (safely) get out of your comfort zone.

Rule 9: Take charge of your social interactions.

Rule 10: Tie up loose ends after the conference.

 

Under Rule 6: Make a conference strategy the third paragraph says:

 

“How do you prioritize what to attend? First, it is good to attend keynote and panel sessions as they provide perspective into the wider concerns of your field and often are forward looking to emerging challenges. Second, definitely attend technical presentations related to your specific area of focus in order to know what research is being done and become part of that community of researchers. Reading papers or watching videos in advance and thinking what questions you might like to ask about the work are great ways to prepare so that you can contribute to the discussion in a positive way. Third, the poster sessions are often short, so make sure you know which posters you want to visit while the presenter is there. Fourth, if the conference offers any first-time or new attendee events, plan on attending those as you will make some connections with other attendees that will make the conference more enjoyable and less lonely. Finally, attending the networking events (see Rule 7) helps you get to know your colleagues as individuals on a personal level (not all discussions are about the research) and also exchanging your research ideas.”

 

And there also is an 18-page pdf article from 2025 at Thompson Rivers University titled The Student Presenter’s Guide to Conferences.

 

On September 7, 2025 I blogged about another article from PLoS Computational Biology  on Ten simple rules for improving communication among scientists.

 

The graphic was adapted from this one at OpenClipArt.

 

 

Seven tips on how to write a great speech

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an excellent short article by Kulamkan Kulasegaram, Douglas Buller, and Cynthis Whitehead in Perspectives on Medical Education on pages 270 to 272 of the July 13, 2017 issue titled Taking presentations seriously: Invoking narrative craft in academic talks. They give the following seven speechwriting tips:

 

1] The act of writing a presentation can yield a clear academic presentation and provide clarity on the topic of presentation.

 

2] Work backwards from key message or conclusion you want the audience to understand at the talk.

 

3] Plot the most efficient and engaging route to this conclusion when writing your presentation. Remove extraneous information that distracts from this conclusion; focus the presentation on the salient points that lead up to your conclusion.

 

4] Each element of the presentation must serve the dual purpose of conveying information and facilitating engagement with the presentation. The effectiveness of conveying information depends on the level of engagement or interaction with the audience.

 

5] Interaction with the audience in a talk means engaging their attention and memory on the concept(s) you wish to convey.

 

6] You can more effectively engage with the audience by designing your talk around instructional design and information processing principles that address the audience members’ capacities for attention and memory.

 

7] Creating presentations is an exercise in creating meaning out of slides, words, and concepts. Revisit your talk once you have completed it and evaluate whether the meaning you want to convey is delivered effectively through the elements of your presentation.

 

The image was adapted from this one at OpenClipArt.

 

 

Ten simple rules for improving communication among scientists

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an excellent 14-page article by Carla Bautista et al. in PLoS Computational Biology on June 23, 2022 titled Ten simple rules for improving communication among scientists. It has six authors and 31 references. Those ten rules can be grouped into three areas: Speak, Join, and Assess, as is outlined and shown above [Figure 1]:

 

  1] Know your audience

  2] Use social media

  3] Listen how other scientists present their work

  4] Network with scientists and ask for feedback

  5] Get involved with scientific organizations

  6] Create opportunities to practice public speaking

  7] Organize scientific meetings

  8] Identify and enroll in scientific activities

  9] Collaborate with other scientists

10] Pace yourself! Don’t overcommit

 

The sixth section begins:

“Scientists communicate about their research throughout their careers. Learning how to give talks of different lengths and for a variety of audiences is an essential skill. Many platforms offer different types of talks for diverse audiences (e.g., the general public or more specialized audiences) and environments (e.g., academic or less formal interactions). Practicing your public speaking with diverse audiences and settings will teach you to adapt your presentation style and goals for each public speaking engagement. The presentation format is also essential; for example, poster presentations are generally more interactive and a presenter might be stopped and asked questions providing more room for discussion.

Practicing to communicate with broader audiences and communicating your topic without jargon will improve communication with fellow scientists (see Rule 4, especially with those outside your field of study. Therefore, aim to find places (or organize them yourself, see Rule 7) where you can practice presenting longer 1-hour talks or shorter 15-minute seminar-style presentations.”

 

 

 

 

An interesting book by Emily Kasriel on Deep Listening

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have been looking at an interesting book from 2025 by Emily Kasriel titled Deep Listening: Transform Your Relationships with Family, Friends, and Foes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Pages 10 and 11 in the Amazon sample list the eight steps shown above. They are described as follows:

 

Step One: Create Space. [Pages 83 to 106]. You begin by creating a place of psychological safety for your speaker. There are also physical changes you can make to your environment, so a conversation feels effortless. Your ambition: your speaker feels cherished and inspired to explore new ideas.

 

Step Two: Listen to Yourself First. [Pages 107 to 132].  You can’t be open to listening to others until you truly listen to yourself. This step explains how you can begin to forge a more positive relationship to your family of shadows, the unacceptable parts of yourself, so they no longer hijack your most important encounters.

 

Step Three: Be Present. [Pages 133 to 157].  This step will delve into an elliptical yet impactful aspect of Deep Listening – your presence, which transforms standard listening into a profound encounter. We explore what presence is, and how you can cultivate it to tackle the internal and external distractions that obstruct true listening.

 

Step Four: Be Curious. [Pages 159 to 186].  Here we unpack the qualities you project towards your speaker: curiosity, empathy, awareness of judgements and respect. Acknowledging that you don’t already know what’s in the mind of your speaker can be transformative.

 

Step Five: Hold the Gaze. [Pages 187 to 206]. This step explores the power of a steady, warm-hearted gaze and other non-verbal cues to communicate to your speaker that they are being heard. We explore how far you can read your speaker’s body language, facial expression and tone to understand what they are not expressing directly.

 

Step Six: Hold the Silence. [Pages 207 to 227]. In this step we unravel the many types of silence and the reasons why you may resist a pause. How can you use a rich stillness to centre yourself and signal to your speaker your true respect, giving them the space to think, reflect and share?

 

Step Seven: Reflect Back. [Pages 229 to 254]. Here we uncover how to crystallise what you’re hearing and reflect it back to your speaker. What are the clues that can guide you as you check your understanding of the meaning of what your speaker has conveyed, directly and between the lines?

 

 Step Eight: Go Deeper. [Pages 255 to 279]. This step explains how your listening can illuminate what ordinarily is hidden – your speaker’s deeper narrative. This deeper narrative is vital to understanding your speaker – and can include their unexpressed needs and whether their emotions are in harmony or alive with contradictions.

 

Each chapter has a list of takeaways. For example:

 

CREATE SPACE TAKEAWAYS – page 105

 

Find or create a place of safety | One where your speaker will feel free from any physical or psychological threat.

 

Contract to cultivate trust | Be transparent at the outset, clarify your intentions. Address how long the conversation is expected to last and what happens with any shared information, if relevant.

 

Listen before you speak | Unless you are habitually silenced in this relationship.

 

Get the physical setting right | Avoid glass and metal, which create bad echoes, and seek out wood and fabric. Choose warmer coloured diffused lighting and stay away from the harshness of overhead and blue-white light.

 

Ensure you are both rested and fed | Before an important conversation.

 

Adjust your position or take a journey | sit at an angle of 60 degrees to your speaker or walk with a slow rhythm so you are in sync with your bodies and each other.

 

Turn to nature | Nature can be an enriching setting for a difficult encounter, providing soft fascination and dissolving stress.

 

Earlier Emily briefly described Deep Listening in a feature article in the Winter 2022 issue of the Stanford Social Innovation Review.

 

My spiral was adapted from this art deco image at OpenClipArt.

 

Contrails are real, chemtrails are nonsense

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back on June 27, 2020 I blogged about Contrails or chemtrails? I said that chemtrails were a conspiracy theory and nonsense.

 

There is an article by Benjamin Radford on July 25, 2025 at the Skeptical Inquirer titled EPA Debunks Chemtrails. And there is a second article by Mick West in the January/February 2024 issue titled What Happened to Chemtrails?

 

A news release from the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) on July 10, 2025 is titled EPA Releases New Online Resource Giving Total Transparency on the Issues of Geoengineering and Chemtrails. There is a 4-page pdf on July 18, 2025 titled Contrails Fact Sheet. And there is a web page updated July 22, 2025 titled Information on Contrails from Aircraft. It has sections with the following titles:

 

What are contrails?

How do contrails form?

How long do contrails last?

Research on the environmental impacts of contrails

What are ‘chemtrails’?

What is intentionally sprayed from airplanes?

Are contrails related to geoengineering or weather modification?

What is HAARP and is it related to contrails, geoengineering or weather modification?

 

Yet there is an article from Kate Plummer at Newsweek on June 3, 2025 titled Map Shows States Trying to Ban ‘Chemtrails’. Nine are Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Texas.

 

Earlier on March 19, 2021 Lana Del Ray released an album titled Chemtrails Over the Country Club that has a Wikipedia page. Her title song, which has a YouTube video, says:

 

“Me and my sister just playing it cool
Under the chemtrails over the country club.”

 

Finally, there is an article by Ron Smith at the Royal Aeronautical Society on April 14, 2023 titled ‘Chemtrails’ debunked that has sections titled:

 

Contrails or ‘chemtrails’?

Iridescent contrails

How to see and photograph iridescent contrails

 

An image of contrails was cropped from one at Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

Editing as Excavating

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

Editing may involve serious digging. There is a useful article by Yi Shun Lai in The Writer magazine on September 20, 2024 titled The editor, the excavator and subtitled Sometimes it takes another set of eyes to see what your story is REALLY about. She begins:

 

“The essay begins nicely. It’s fabulously written, ostensibly about the way a young man feels having his life chronicled each week in his mother’s newspaper column.

 

About three-quarters of the way through, the writer recounts an event that makes my ears prick up, something so significant that it gives the words and events in the pages before a new angle. And then he kind of just drops it. I can feel him physically dragging the essay back to what it was about before, trying to give due diligence to the narrative plan he’s laid out for himself.

 

The essay holds my attention all the way through, but by the end of it, I’m feeling hungover, literally, because hangovers are accompanied by the sense that you know you did something last night; you just can’t place exactly what it is. I read the writer’s cover letter, thinking there might be some hint as to whether or not I’ve misread the essay, but it doesn’t elucidate the issue for me, so I ping the writer an email asking for a phone conference.

Long story short, we published the writer, but what went into our literary magazine was a reasonably far cry from the submission I received. The lead-in had changed. The event that had gripped my attention was given more clout, and was recounted all the way through. The final touch was a new title for the piece, since the essay was no longer about what it used to be about.”

 

 

 

 

 

Dropping an event is known as Chekhov’s gun, which I blogged about on July 12, 2019 in a post titled Chekhov’s Gun – speechwriting advice from a cartoon. Both Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations and the Yale Book of Quotations state it as:

 

“One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.”

 

An image of a Caterpillar 330 Excavator came from Wikimedia Commons, and a Winchester rifle came from OpenClipArt.

 

 

A magazine article with 18 practical strategies for accepting and managing stage fright among musicians

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an interesting and useful article by Eva Bojner Horwitz and Paulina Valtasaari at Frontiers in Psychology on June 24, 2025 titled Acceptance and management of stage fright among musicians: a manual of practical strategies. Most of their 18 strategies also apply to speech fright (fear of public speaking). The article has a series of eighteen useful stick figures that are shown in Figure 1. And Table 1 presents themes for them describing how you should feel and act, and the result. (The seven-page .pdf file has a much clearer version of Table 1 than the text does).

 

Table 2 presents their 18 strategies grouped into five categories related to stage fright. For brevity, I have just listed each theme and how to feel. They are as follows:

 

Awareness and Attention

Conscious Awareness: Locate emotions in your body and observe thoughts.

Listen! Hear and feel the sound resonate in your body.

Feel Your Body: Scan body sensations neutrally.

Breath: Sense breathing patterns and muscle tension.

Concentration: Notice sensations and interactions with your instrument.

Focus on Your Mind: Observe thoughts and their effects on the body.

 

Stress and Relaxation

Unwind: Recognize arousal and post-stress recovery needs.

Relax: Recognize when relaxation is possible or obstructed.

Heat Control: Adapt to warmth or cols.

When Alarm Goes Off: Recognize early signs of stress.

 

Self-Reflection

Self-Reflection: Process successes and failures constructively.

Suggestion: Notice self-critical thoughts’ physical effects.

 

Visualisation and Goal Setting

Set a Goal: Balance excitement and self-efficacy.

Visualize: Imagine playing vividly, noting sensations and movements.

Inner Vision: Focus on specific parts or tasks in your body.

 

Recalling Positive Experiences

Memorize Good Memories: Relive successes and supportive interactions.

Happy and Pleased: Sense happiness in your body.

Satisfied: Identify physical sensations of satisfaction.

 

The pianist image was cropped from one at Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

Quit pissing around and fix your presentation slides

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

There is a brief but excellent article by Michael Leveridge at the Canadian Urologic Association Journal for April 2025 (Volume 19, Number 4, pages 78 and 79) titled This is a busy slide: Fix your presentations this year. He has the following advice:

 

Cognitive Load

 

“Your presentation imparts a ‘load’ on the audience member. All of the information piles into working memory for processing, and only if connections are made will schemata form and encode into long-term memory.

 

The intrinsic load is the complexity or difficulty of the material. It varies between recipients, as those already expert can process complex concepts more easily than novices. There’s not much you can do in the moment to change the complexity or the audience’s knowledge base, but you can think ahead about each.

 

The extrinsic load is everything about the speech and visuals that is not relevant to understanding the material. It is the mental effort required in deciphering redundant text, linking words and visuals, or parsing dense graphics: a marginally relevant image, the static of hearing words being read as you try to read them, irrelevant lines on that table, the back-and-forth to align the figure legend with the curves. These fall under the research-backed principles like coherence, redundancy, and spatial contiguity, and these names suggest the solutions (Ref. 2).

 

Cut the superfluous text and visuals, even if interesting. Signal to the relevant points on the tables and visuals. Bring like elements together on the slide to decrease the work of linking them. Graphic design principles – alignment, repetition and proximity – are the tools of facilitating understanding by removing clutter. Again, a sweep to declutter and intentionally arrange your slide deck is a quick and powerful thing.”

 

My cartoon was adapted from this one at Wikimedia Commons.

 

 

Is it true just because I read it in a book? No! Here’s an inaccurate paragraph on speech anxiety

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back on March 2, 2013 I had a post titled I read it in a book, so it must be true. Recently I was looking at the 2020 third edition of J. Dan Rothwell’s book, Practically Speaking. In Chapter 2 on Speech Anxiety there is a section on Pervasiveness of Speech Anxiety: A Common Experience beginning with the following paragraph on page 23 (it also is on page 19 in the 2017 second edition):

 

“Mark Twain once remarked, ‘There are two types of speakers; those who are nervous and those who are liars.’ Overstated perhaps, but fear of public speaking is widespread (Pull, 2012). A survey by Chapman University of 1,500 respondents put the fear factor at 62% (‘The Chapman University Survey,’ 2015). This same study also showed fear of public speaking as greater than fear of heights (61%), drowning (47%), flying (39%), and yes, zombies (18%). The fear of public speaking holds true for both face-to-face and web-based online speeches given to remote audiences (Campbell and Larson, 2012).”

 

On May 12, 2020 I blogged on Did Mark Twain really say there were just nervous speakers or liars? He didn’t – that quote first shows up decades after he died.

 

Professor Rothwell referred to public speaking being widespread - based on a 2012 article by Charles B. Pull in Current Opinion in Psychiatry for 2012 (Volume 25, Number 1 pages 25 to 38) titled Current Status of Knowledge on Public-speaking Anxiety. That article reviewed articles from just August 2008 to August 2011. It omitted one by A.M. Ruscio et al. in Psychological Medicine (November 2007 Volume 38, Number 1, pages 15 to 28) titled Social Fears and Social Phobia in the United States: Results from the National Comorbidity Survey Replication. I blogged about it on August 12, 2015 in a post titled There’s really no mystery about how common stage fright is and pointed out that result was just 21.2%.

 

And the blog post for the 2015 Chapman Survey of American Fears lists the sum for Very Afraid + Afraid. It says public speaking is ranked #26 at 28.4%, heights is ranked #28 at 27.4%, zombies is ranked #82 at 8.5%, but drowning is not even listed. (It is in the 2014 survey at 19.3%).  Professor Rothwell exaggerated by instead listing the sums for Very Afraid + Afraid + Slightly Afraid. 

 

Finally, the 2012 Campbell and Larson article in the Journal of Instructional Pedagogies titled Public speaking anxiety: comparing face-to-face and web-based speeches tells us:

 

“Of the group of 70 students, 65 responded to the question. Almost half of the students (45.7%) were more anxious about giving their speech face-to-face, and a little more than one third (34.3%) were more anxious about the web-based delivery.”

 

On September 6, 2022 I blogged about he we should Beware of surveys with small sample sizes, which have large margins of error. For a sample size n = 70, the margin is 11.7%. The difference between face-to-face and web-based is 11.4% - within the margin and not significant.

 

My cartoon was modified from one at OpenClipArt.

 

 

An amusing xkcd cartoon about types of bridges

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Randal Munroe’s xkcd cartoon for June 2, 2025 is titled Bridge Types. As shown above, it has sixteen of them, which are discussed over at Explain xkcd. Some make good sense: truss, arch, suspended arch, and suspension. The fifteenth is labeled as fun and it has a loop in the center.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

But the idea of a double loop as part of a scenic railway (roller coaster) was used almost twelve decades ago in a Puck cartoon titled Pity the Poor Brooklynite, as is shown above. It came from page 5 of the October 24, 1906 issue of that magazine!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is another Puck cartoon (shown above) from page 3 of March 7, 1906 with a bridge alternative titled The Brooklyn Strapid Transit System.

 

 

Similes in speechwriting

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines a simile as:

 

“a figure of speech comparing two unlike things that is often introduced by like or as (as in cheeks like roses)”

 

Of course, there also is a Wikipedia page. And there is a brief, humorous article by John Cadley in the August 2019 issue of Toastmaster Magazine on page 30 titled Silly Similes - those wonderful idioms that don’t say what they mean.

 

A song by John Prine titled It’s A Big Old Goofy World is stitched together from similes. You can listen to it here at YouTube. And Mickey Cheatham posted about it in his STEAMD blog on January 1, 2021. The first verse is:

 

“Up in the morning
Work like a dog
Is better than sitting
Like a bump on a log
Mind all your manners
Be quiet as a mouse
Someday you'll own a home
That's as big as a house”

 

Chapter 17 – Professional Speechwriting: Metaphor, Simile, and Theme by Lynn Meade in her Advanced Public Speaking book has a discussion of similies (and more on metaphors).

 

The mouse cartoon came from OpenClipArt.

 

The Certainty Illusion: What you don’t know and why it matters

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an interesting 2025 book by Timothy Caulfield on separating nonsense from sense titled The Certainty Illusion: What you don’t know and why it matters. A preview is at Google Books. This book is divided in three parts:

Part I: The Science Illusion

Part II: The Goodness Illusion

Part III: The Opinion Illusion

 

In Part I, in a section on The Predator Problem on page 63 he discusses predatory journals:

 

“Predatory journals profit by charging researchers a fee to publish – which many legitimate publications also do (sometimes the fee is more than $10,000!), especially journals that are open access. But predatory journals have a lax peer-review process or almost none at all. They’ll publish just about anything. Their editorial boards – the entities meant to apply rigorous standards to decide what gets published – are often padded with questionable ‘experts.’ For example, Dr. Olivia Doll sat on the editorial board of seven academic journals. She is, or so it has been claimed, a celebrated authority in ‘avian propinquity to canines in metropolitan suburbs’ and ‘the benefits of abdominal massage for medium-sized canines.’ No surprise, as Dr. Olivia Doll is a Staffordshire terrier named Ollie. Chasing birds and belly rubs are central to her career agenda. Despite these passions, she has found time to review manuscripts for journals like Global Journal of Addiction & Rehabilitation Medicine and Psychiatry and Mental Disorders. She did that. Good doggie! And she has published a few articles herself, including co-authoring a piece with Alice Wuenderlandt from Lutenblag University in Molvania…

 

Ollie’s career as an editor was the brainchild of professor Mike Daube, a public health researcher at Curtin University in Australia. He wanted to demonstrate how these journals lacked credibility. Mission accomplished. The credentials of Dr. Olivia Doll, also known as Ollie the dog, were accepted by all these publications, despite the fact that, as Professor Daube has noted, ‘it would take a five-year-old one click to expose this. In fact, one journal told Ollie that they were ‘delighted to have such an eminent person as yourself.’ Woof.”

 

Dr. Doll is discussed by Ryan Cross in a Science article on May 24, 2017 titled Australian dog serves on the editorial boards of seven medical journals and another article by Kelsey Kennedy at Atlas Obscura on May 25, 2017 titled This Dog Sits on Seven Editorial Boards.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And in Part II: The Goodness Illusion, starting on page 101 he discusses The Devious Dozen buzzword terms, which are: Natural, Holistic, Healthy, Organic, Non-GMO, Gluten-Free, Chemical-Free, Toxin-Free, Locally Grown, The Colour Green, Immune-Boosting, and Personalized. Another three honorable mentions: are Low-Fat, Sugar-Free, and Protein.

 

The cartoon was adapted from this one at OpenClipArt.  

  

Are you a really good listener?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There is an excellent five-page article by Jeffrey Yip and Colin M. Fisher in the May-June 2025 issue of the Harvard Business Review on pages 139 to 143 titled Are you really a good listener? which you can listen to here. But you have to pay for the full text unless, like me, you can find that magazine free in databases such as EBSCOhost at your public library.

 

There are sections in that article titled Haste, Defensiveness, Invisibility, Exhaustion, and Inaction with the following statements:

 

Under Haste:

 

“Good listening is a demanding task that tames time. In our work we’ve found that people feel heard only when listeners focus their attention, demonstrate interest, and ensure that they’re understood.”

 

Under Defensiveness:

 

“The lesson is to steel yourself against defensiveness by calming your own emotions and seeking to understand the other parties’ intentions before responding. Before you speak, take stock of yourself. If you feel criticized or threatened, buy yourself time by simply restating what you think the speaker has said or thanking that person for sharing.”  

 

Under Invisibility:

 

“One of the most common mistakes we see among managers is not showing that they’re listening, which makes them appear indifferent and disconnected. Sometimes organizational leaders are working behind the scenes to fix problems identified in town halls or staff surveys but fail to broadcast those efforts to employees.”

 

Under Exhaustion:

 

“Exhaustion is a silent killer of effective listening. When leaders are physically or emotionally drained, they lose their capacity to focus, process, and engage productively with employees.”  

 

Under Inaction:

 

“The final pitfall is perhaps the most pernicious: receiving the speaker’s message but then not following up on it.”

 

The cartoon was adapted from one at OpenClipArt.

 

 

Remembering skeptical investigator Joe Nickell

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have long enjoyed reading articles and books by Joe Nickell, particularly his Investigative Files columns in Skeptical Inquirer magazine. There is an article by Blake Smith at The Skeptic on March 10, 2025 titled Joe Nickell, legendary skeptical investigator, dies at the age of 80. A second article by Jonathan Jarry at the McGill Office for Science and Society on March 14, 2025 is titled Remembering Joe Nickell, Skeptical Icon. A longer third article by Benjamin Radford at the Center for Inquiry on March 12, 2025 is titled The Joe I Know. There is a good magazine article about him by Burkhard Bilger in The New Yorker for December 23 and 30, 2002 titled Waiting for Ghosts. Joe wrote about thirty books and hundreds of magazine articles.

 

Among other things, he is known for his work on the holy Shroud of Turin, and having produced a no-so-holy Shroud of Bing Crosby. If you are looking for a skeptical take on several topics for a speech, then look up his 2011 book titled Tracking the Man-Beasts: sasquatch, vampires, zombies and more.   

 

A 2018 portrait  came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

We can edit our speech for more clarity. Be like an OK’er at The New Yorker magazine.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

At BBC Sounds - The Media Show on February 20, 2025 there is an interview titled The Explanation: The Media Show: Diplomacy and the media and 100 years of the New Yorker. The editor, David Remnick was interviewed, and he discussed their unusual process for articles at 20:35:

 

“The writer sends in the first draft. It’s 10,000 words or how ever long the piece is. What happens then? And then he or she sits down with the editor, who’s read it, at least once right away and they have discussions about further work to be done on it.

 

There are copy editors and something called wildly OK’ers. OK’ers? OK’ers! What do they do? Which is a high position of copy editor but the mission is clarity. Not to rob the writer of his or her voice, but clarity. This is a very high premium here.

 

And the other very high premium is accuracy and fairness. We have 28 fact checkers, not just to make sure you spell a complicated name correctly, or get the dates right, but also to call the sources and say is it true that you said this?    

 

Just clear up exactly what an OK’er is. Because there are going to be people listening right now who are thinking maybe I need an OK’er in my business. Help us understand the role. What precisely is an OK’er doing? An OK’er is a higher version of copy editing.

 

Copy editing is, you know, that and which and misspellings and sentences.  OK’ers, if they’re good at it, are giving a final read that is aimed at clarity and misdirection and indirection and vague wording and things that could be even that much clearer.

 

These are people – it’s like somebody who can tune a piano without a tuning fork. People who are really tuned in to language and repetition and just the act of clarity and accuracy.”   

 

Earlier Mary Norris discussed the page OK’er in her 2016 book Between You and Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen:

 

“And it has now been more than twenty years since I became a page OK’er – a position that exists only at The New Yorker where you query-proofread pieces and manage them, with the editor, the author, a fact checker, and a second proofreader, until they go to press. An editor once called us prose goddesses; another job description might be comma queen. Except for writing, I have never seriously considered doing anything else.”

 

We can be the OK’er for the speech we are writing by reading it one more time, just for clarity.

 

My cartoon was adapted from one at Openclipart.