What Is Scientific Writing?

Chapter 1

What Is Scientific Writing?

•Communication of data in a concise and meaningful manner

•Audience understanding is critical

• In science, this can be difficult because you are saying something for the very first time

• You are contributing new knowledge to the scientific community

•Communication of data in a concise and meaningful manner (cont.)

• You must avoid verbosity (literary embellishments)

• Metaphors - using a word as something it’s not

• “The curtain of night”

• Similes - comparing one thing to another

• “Heart as big as a whale’s”

• Idioms - nonliteral use of a word

• “She caught his eye”

• Be economical (clear and simple) in your writing; the concepts are difficult enough

What Is Scientific Writing?

Historical Perspectives

• In the “early” days of science (centuries ago), scientific writing was descriptive

• The scientific method (hypothesis testing) had not been developed

• Scientists were interested in describing their surrounding world

•As science progressed (1800s) descriptive writing was still employed, despite the development of the scientific method

•As a result, it was often difficult to repeat experiments performed by others

Historical Perspectives•After World War II scientific research was

expanded dramatically

• The development of new weapons, principally the atomic bomb, stimulated this growth

• In 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik

• The launch of Sputnik led to a national security crisis• It was now conceivable that nuclear weapons could be delivered

by space vehicles (30 min to target)

• For the first time in U. S. history, a President (Eisenhower) conducted a live address to the nation about a scientific topic

Historical Perspectives

• Eisenhower’s administration collected the various Federal scientific funding agencies into large groups

•National Institutes of Health

•National Science Foundation

•National Aeronautics and Space Administration

• Funding for scientific research and education expanded exponentially

• This led to a surge in the amount of data generated by the scientific communities

• Journals were inundated with manuscripts - still written in descriptive form

Historical Perspectives

•Because of this increase in manuscript submissions, journal editors had to devise a new system to reduce the verbosity of descriptive writing

• IMRAD

• Introduction - What is the problem?

•Materials and Methods - How was the problem addressed?

•Results - What was found?

•And Discussion - What does it mean?

Historical Perspectives

• The IMRAD (or IRDAM) system is now nearly universally adopted by journals

• The result has been force economy in writing

• The style and format of articles are identical, thus provide more efficient review and analysis

• The replication of experiments by other investigators has become easier