Graphical abstracts are so passé, let’s hear it for the haiku highlight

Graphical abstracts,

They’re past their sell by date;

Use Haikus instead

 

It may surprise you, or perhaps not, that insects, as well as inspiring poets to wax lyrical, inspire many entomologists to wax poetical 🙂  Indeed, I have, on occasion, penned the odd verse myself.

Available at a very reasonable price from Pemberley Books  and no, I have no vested interests 🙂

Back in 2016 I stepped down as Editor-in-Chief of Insect Conservation & Diversity to become a Senior Editor, handing over the reins to Raphael Didham who had been a Senior Editor since 2010.  Now, I have known Raph a long time, back in the 1990s we were colleagues at Silwood Park, but it wasn’t until I convinced him to join Twitter as @EntoRaph, at the Royal Entomological Society Publications Meeting in March this year, that I discovered his dark secret.  He is a poet as well as an entomologist!  Raph is, despite his late conversion to Twitter, a pretty innovative guy; just look at the excellent changes he has made to our journal, and once he discovered, via Twitter, that I too, indulge in the odd spot of verse, haikus to be precise, it was inevitable that the idea of the Haiku Highlight was born 🙂

The birth of a notion

And that dear Reader, is how it all began………

I was quite proud of this one 🙂

The eagle-eyed reader may have noticed that the hashtag for our Haiku Highlights is #sciku. The Sciku project  is the brainwave of zoologist Andrew Holmes @AndrewMHolmes, who argues that writing haiku has made him a better scientist.  Being asked to keep your writing short and sweet, yet still understandable, may sometimes be difficult, but as Judy Fort Brenneman points out, it can be great fun.

If you would like to contribute to our Haiku Highlight project do get in touch. I wonder if it will catch on with other journals, it would certainly be fun.  While I am on the subject of entomologist poets, if you like butterflies and poetry, I can thoroughly recommend The Butterfly Collection, by Richard Harrington; beautiful photographs and a range of verse from haiku to sonnet.

 

Published by Brambleby Books http://www.bramblebybooks.co.uk/butterfly_collection.asp