Week 2, Perfect Paragraph

This week we had to read Chapter 3 and 7 from the “Writing in the Biological Sciences” text. In my opinion, the most important factor to remember when writing is to always write with the reader in mind. After you have already formulated your hypothesis, performed all the necessary experiments and research, it is time to focus on who is going to be reading your writing. Ask yourself: “what is the most important piece of information you would like to convey to your audience?” Remember to write clearly. For instance, the first paragraph of this chapter mentions that we need to take into account how the reader is going to interpret our writing. If we were trying to appeal to a feeling or evoke some kind of emotional response from our reader then we would lean towards using fancy, and flowy language and phrases. However, when trying to communicate scientifically, that kind of writing is unecessary and instead it makes more sense to use precise, clear language that is easy to understand and is correctly worded. It is important to establish importance in a sentence as well. Depending on where a certain phrase is placed and what punctuation is used, it can be viewed as something negative or as something positive. Old information is placed at the beginning of a paragraph and new information that needs more emphasis, is placed at the end of a sentence. Last, but not least, we need to remember to use past tense for observations, unpublished results, and specific interpretations and to use present tense for general rules, accepted facts and established knowledge.