This book grew out of a repeated need, as graduate supervisor, referee (reviewer), and editor, to comment about irritants such as:

• the sins of ambiguity, circumlocution, confusion, inconsistency, vagueness and verbosity;

• misuse (or distractingly poor use) of words such as content, decimate, impact, level, light intensity, paradigm, parameter, and ratio;

• quantitative matters such as equations that didn’t equate, ludicrous precision of numerical values, misleading bar charts, graphs with inaccurate axis labels, nonsensical ‘log scales’, and undefined error bars;

• statistics-related misuses such as the difference between standard deviation and standard error, statistical fishing expeditions, the meaning of a ‘P-value’, and confusion among correlation, regression, and functional relations;

• incomprehensible talks and unattractive, or even repellent, posters.

What follows includes my gleanings during four decades as a university biologist: the things I wish now that I had known when I started out. It is mostly about broadcasting for the first time the results of original work in the biosciences (the inelegant umbrella term ‘bioscience’ embraces all the disciplines that work on living things, including biochemistry, molecular biology, genetics, microbiology, biology, botany, zoology, anatomy, morphology, physiology, ecology, and applications in, for example, medicine, psychology, and soil science). This book is intended mainly for those beginning a career in bioscience research. If you are such an apprentice or journeyman then I hope that you learn from the mistakes I made at your age. Established bioscientists may also find things to interest them.