Ch. 3 – Fundamental of Scientific Writing Part 1: Style
It is important to write with the reader in mind. You have already formulated your hypothesis, performed all the necessary experiments and steps, now it is time to focus on who is going to be reading your writing and what is the most important piece of information you would like to convey to your audience. We need to write clearly. For instance, I liked how 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 use fancy, and flowy language. However, in scientific communication, that is unecessary and instead it would make more sense to use precise, clear language that is easy to understand and is correctly worded. There was a list of words that should be omitted entirely that I didn’t think were a problem before, such as: actually, basically, essentially, very, really, etc (pg 26).
At first, it seemed strange to me that the goal of scientific writing is to make our writing as short and clear as possible. I always thought that there was some type of positive correlation between using more words, longer sentences and a more academic and “smarter sounding” scientific piece of writing. But, that is not the case! Something else I found interesting was how human genes are in all caps and italics and human proteins are in all caps but not in italics. Mouse genes and proteins are also the same way except that only the first letter is capitalized. 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. I think that this grammatical rule is often forgetten but as scientific writers we need to try our best to place the verb right after the subject and not include a lot of information in the middle. When we write our methods introduction, we should not use the first person, however, use of the first person is okay to do in other sections. Last but not least, remember to use past tense for observations, unpublished results, and specific interpretations and use present tense for general rules, accepted facts and established knowledge (pg 24).
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