The sentence (suitably disguised for confidentiality) stopped me in my tracks: "The absence of pregnancy and lactation may explain the lower average morbidity in stallions than in mares." The meaning was clear, but something about it struck me as odd. I couldn't put my finger on it first, but after some thought zoomed in on "The absence of pregnancy and lactation." True, stallions don't become pregnant. My immediate thought was that male seahorses do become pregnant. My wand

The book I was editing was about personal transformation for corporate managers. The author was a well-known coach. The language was so casual that I thought parts of it must have been dictated to a word processor over lunch. The degree of informality surprised me first, but as I worked my way into the book, I realized that the problem was mine, not the author's: I was unfamiliar with the genre. But I was getting used to the writing, and I knew I had passed a learning milesto

In my post Researcher Name Coincidence, I quoted from the book Academia Obscura by Glen Wright: As part of a long-running bet, five Swedish scientists have been sneaking Bob Dylan lyrics into paper titles. This is how a paper on intestinal gases acquired the title ‘Nitric oxide and inflammation: The answer is blowing in the wind’. Elsewhere, the Rolling Stones have been immortalized (‘“I can’t get no satisfaction”: The impact of personality and emotion on postpurchase process

The difference between summation and sum should be clear enough: summation is the process of adding, whereas a sum is the result of the addition. Thus, "the sum of 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 is 15." The sum of the five numbers is 15 (the result). It'd be incorrect to write "the summation of the five numbers is 3." This much is clear. Now, consider how the word summation is used. The summation operation is represented by the summation symbol The addition 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 is represente