Scientific Writing Tips

Scientific Writing is an essential step in presenting and elaborating of scientific results and data gathered during research. Still, schools often minimize the amount of time students spend on learning how to write in favor of scientific concepts and methods.

But the ability to effectively communicate your point and show your message is crucial in your road to success. People need to be able to understand your findings and without a research paper turning raw data that only you can understand into digestible conclusions, your findings could prove to be useless.

Even other scientists prefer to read the entire essay rather than just look at some numbers. This is why learning how to write properly for scientific purposes is really important in every scientist’s life. But because they don’t teach this in schools, scientists have to learn how to write themselves. In the spirit of the growth mindset, they definitely should.

Here are some useful scientific writing tips to get you started.

Your paper should flow

No matter how dry the data is to an untrained eye, the paper should flow impeccably. You want to grab and retain attention and spark interest in your field of work. This has several meanings. For one, the reader should be able to transition from section to section and from concept to concept. To keep this up, remind yourself of the story you are trying to tell and always connect new questions to previous ideas and resolutions and resolutions to new concepts and so on. As a rule, try to stick to the same subject throughout the section and mix the sentence length to maintain their interest and avoid boredom in the reader. Emphasize certain things that you find important, especially in comparison with the previous statements that you made. Keep in mind that ideas that are placed near the end of the sentence are usually perceived as the most important.

Be aware of the overall style of writing, make it fun and interesting for your readers but still formal enough to reflect the fact that it is a scientific document.

Use mostly active voice with some passive

If you are mostly using the active voice with an occasional passive sentence where it sounds and feels better than an active sentence, your writing is stronger and better. Scientific writing is full of passive voice which weakens powerful statements by taking the action away from the action. But, when used appropriately, the passive voice might actually improve your writing and make it more comprehensible for the user.

Avoid jargon

Jargon, flowery prose and technical terms can be redundant in scientific writing. Your audience is looking for something comprehensible and easy to digest, not something they will have to use the dictionary for. So make the writing simple yet powerful, regular words have more impact.

Edit meticulously

Editing is often just as important as writing since you can find and remove many mistakes that you might be making in your writing.

For scientists to write stellar and interesting papers, it’s crucial to follow these steps. They show you how to make an entertaining paper that can be meaningful in future studies.