Tips for Making Your Paper Have Broad Impact

Meaghan here! I have been working for PBS Eons for a few months now as a writer. It has been amazing - I have learned so much about different organisms I never really looked into before, and about the whole process of scientific storytelling.  Some personal moments of pride include a video about climate that went viral, and also slipping a 9 minute dick joke past the PBS censors. And one of the big things I've learned along the way are that there are certain things you can put in scientific papers that make me want to write love sonnets to the authors, and certain things you can omit that make me want to glitterbomb your office. So that's what this blog is about: what can you put in papers so that it's easier for science writers to read them and get the information they need to compose a good piece of science communication about it?

Or: please sweet Jesus help me out, mama needs to not have to read 60 papers and resort to Image-J when trying to figure out how tall a T-Rex was.

Paleontology of Big Bend National Park

Last summer was a busy one for the Vengeance Team. Meaghan completed her PhD, got married, and got the most adorable puppy on the planet. Amy crafted the shit out of Meaghan's wedding, mostly didn't cry, finally appreciated sheep (kinda) and then spent the rest of her summer working as the paleontology intern for Big Bend National Park in west Texas. Since we're paleontologists time as we mortals experience has no meaning, so we have decided to talk about Amy's Awesome Summer now, in the dead of winter, several months later (it's not procrastination on blog-writing if you can make up a reason for it!)

We've talked a little bit about our adventures in west Texas before on the blog when discussing field work, so this probably sounds familiar. But for those of you just joining us, here's the Big Scoop on Big Bend.