Hyphens in noun clusters

Science writing employs hyphens more often than regular writing. In scientific writing, writers often refer to specific ideas or objects that would be too complex or cumbersome to describe completely every time you mention them.

Noun clusters are groups of nouns that act as one noun in your sentence. A hyphen is used to indicate that a noun is acting as an adjective to modify the subsequent noun:

• Cold-air damming led to freezing rain.
• Surface stations measured sea-level pressure.
• Upper-level temperatures indicated a strong subsidence inversion.

Note that air and level are both nouns that are used to modify the meaning of words like damming, pressure, and temperatures.

The hyphen is not used when the two words stand on their own:

• Cold air leads to lakes freezing in the winter time.
• Pressure was reduced to sea level.
• No front was observed at upper levels.

If you look carefully at any AMS article, you will notice more examples of this convention. When in doubt, check AMS publications to see how the convention is used.

As always, be careful when using hyphens as mistakes can change the entire meaning of a sentence.

Paragraph Structure

Each paragraph should begin with a topic sentence that acts as a thesis statement and summarizes your paragraph. If you are doing a literature review and summarizing other people's work, include the source that contains the information outlined in the paragraph. Use the active voice if possible.

Get to the point II: Figures

Figures

When referring to figures in text,

• Introduce the figure and the main point it is intended to convey early in the paragraph before you begin interpreting results.  
• Refer to figures in order of appearance.
• In the middle of the sentence, name of the figure is capitalized and abbreviated (e.g. Fig. 1).
• At the beginning of a sentence, name of figure is capitalized and unabbreviated (Figure 1).
• Dates/time  should be in format: 8 AM EDT 8 September 2012 or 12 UTC  8 September 2012

For the example used in the previous post, the first two sentences could be accompanied by an introduction to a figure:

• "Figure 1 shows the frequency of hurricane force winds along the Florida coastline."
• "The frequency of hurricane force winds along the Florida coastline is shown in Fig. 1."

You could then proceed with a detailed analysis of the figure in question.

Include all information seen in figure
Include the following information in figure where possible

• Figure title
• Contour labels
• Axis labels
• Parameters
• Dates and times

It is also important that figure captions contain the following information if they are not contained in the figure itself:

• Parameters plotted
• Contour intervals with units
• Source

An example

The example below shows a good caption. Note how the units are clearly indicated on the graph, so there is no need to mention in the caption. Times and dates of data are clear. A legend describes the different parameters plotted, so this is not necessary to put in the captions. If these elements were missing, they would need to be in the captions. Note that analysis is done in the text.

Get to the point I: Paragraph structure

Paragraph Structure

Each paragraph should begin with a topic sentence that acts as a thesis statement and summarizes your paragraph. If you are doing a literature review and summarizing other people's work, include the source that contains the information outlined in the paragraph. Use the active voice if possible.


Prefaces and Segues

A common mistake many students make in scientific and technical writing is to preface paragraphs containing important information about the atmosphere with unnecessary segues and prefaces:

 "Studies of hurricanes have shown that they are a dangerous phenomenon. They represent an important aspect of the tropical environment."

This may be okay in oral presentations, conversation, literary work,  personal diaries, and rants on blogs, but only wastes valuable space in technical reports and science papers. You want to make it as easy as possible for your reader to get the information they need to know.


References and example

It is good style to begin any paragraph with the main point. It is equally good style to begin the first sentence of the paragraph with the reference that backs up this point:

"Smith et al. (2010) showed that  hurricanes can cause significant amounts of damage when they strike populated areas. "
            
This forces you to use the active voice, makes it clear that you are presenting information from an authoritative source, and makes subsequent referencing unnecessary.

If you need to provide secondary references that add to the credibility of the information, this can be done with brackets:

"They used 6-hourly sea-level pressure fields from the NCEP/NCAR reanalysis (Kistler et al. 2001) for the years 1951-2000 to examine hurricane tracks in the North Atlantic Ocean. " 


This gives the reader information  they can use to assess the quality of the study and to reproduce the results if necessary.

 If the order of the above sentences were reversed, the paragraph is less clear because the secondary (albeit important) information appears first, and the main point of the paragraph second. Your reader will mumble under his breath "Get to the point".