SCIENCE WRITING

 Title
 Introduction
 Materials & Methods
 Results
 Discussion
 Acknowledgments (perhaps)
 References
 Appendices (for this paper)
GENERAL RULES
 You are NOT writing for the professor. Real scientists write for an audience who is smart, but
who was not involved in the experiment.
 Don’t refer to the work being done as part of a class, or to your group. Write as if you were a
real scientist who did an experiment
 Past tense everywhere: you already did the experiment
 Headings (Introduction, Methods & Materials, etc.) at the top of each section.
 Use precise language; avoid vague, uninformative terms.
 The active voice should be used as much as possible.
WRITING TIPS
 Tell a story with a plot and make it interesting
 Plan how to order sections within the paper, paragraphs within the section, and sentences
within the paragraph
 Group all information about a topic together in a paragraph or consecutive paragraphs.
 Don’t waste a sentence: “There are many kinds of college students. They can be young, old,
male…” should read, “College students can be young, old, male…”
 Define jargon smoothly
– Bad: “The humpback chub is endemic to Colorado. Endemic is defined as a species that
it occurs in one location but nowhere else.”
– Better: “The humpback chub is endemic to Colorado, occurring there but nowhere else.
 Paragraphs start with topic sentence.
 Start each sentence with old information.
 Avoid “this, those, these.”
 Define new words; remind reader of previously defined words not mentioned for a while.
 Join separate clauses with linking words: but, therefore, etc.
 Conclude sentences with most important new thought.
 Use concluding thought of previous sentence to begin next sentence.
PARTS OF A SCIENTIFIC REPORT: THE TITLE
 Self explanatory: casual reader should be able to tell what you did without reading the paper.
Bad Title: Human Genome Report
Better Title: An Investigation of Inheritance Patterns in the Family of Elsa Falls.
Best Title: An Investigation of Inheritance Patterns in Eye Color, Male-Pattern Baldness, and High
Blood Pressure in Three Generations of Elsa Falls’ Family

Avoid excessively long titles

 Titles should be self contained but not excessively detailed. This title has too much of a good
thing:
 “The effect of zero, five, and ten pound weights on the electromyograph of the extensor muscle
of the human forearm, a study done as part of the Integrative Biology course at Randolph Macon
College on twenty student volunteers during the week of February 7th in 2006.”

PURPOSE OF INTRODUCTION
 Explains the reasoning behind your work.
 Describes the context of your work and how it relates to existing work (such as providing new
information to the field of study).
 Clearly states the purpose of your work.
WHAT ARE THE BASIC THINGS THAT YOU SHOULD ASK BEFORE YOU WRITE YOUR INTRODUCTION? What
is the existing knowledge about this subject?
• Why did you undertake this study?
• What specifically were you going to do?
WHAT IS THE EXISTING STATE OF KNOWLEDGE ABOUT THIS TOPIC?
 You should synthesize information from the literature.
 Should be an account that traces the development of knowledge on the problem and
summarizes its current state.
 The gaps and inadequacies of current knowledge should be identified.
WHAT SPECIFICALLY, WERE YOU GOING TO DO?
 Indicate the specific objectives or testable hypothesis that will be considered.
 These should be as specific as possible.
 In the case of hypotheses: These should be statements that are clearly capable of being either
supported or refuted by the work.
STRUCTURE OF THE INTRODUCTION
 Follow a logical outline.
 One strategy that works well is the “funnel approach”
– Begin with a “global problem” statement that describes the large problem to which your
work is related. End with a clear statement of the specific goal or goals of your specific
work.
 Connect the two statements with a series of logical steps that describe the published
information related to your work and build a logical case for the importance of your
workAdditional Notes
 Restrict background material to that which is directly pertinent to the problem.
 An author of a scientific report should always be prepared to answer the question: Why did you
include this material in the introduction?