Successful Scientific Writing

The detailed, practical, step-by-step advice in this user-friendly guide will help students and researchers to communicate their work more effectively through the written word. Covering all aspects of the writing process, this concise, accessible resource is critically acclaimed, well-structured, comprehensive, and entertaining. Self-help exercises and abundant examples from actual typescripts draw on the authors' extensive experience working both as researchers and with them. Whilst retaining the user-friendly and pragmatic style of earlier editions, this third edition has been updated and broadened to incorporate such timely topics as guidelines for successful international publication, ethical and legal issues including plagiarism and falsified data, electronic publication, and text-based talks and poster presentations. With advice applicable to many writing contexts in the majority of scientific disciplines, this book is a powerful tool for improving individual skills and an eminently suitable text for classroom courses or seminars.

This book takes an integrated approach, using the principles of story structure to discuss every aspect of successful science writing, from the overall structure of a paper or proposal to individual sections, paragraphs, sentences, and words. It begins by building core arguments, analyzing why some stories are engaging and memorable while others are quickly forgotten, and proceeds to the elements of story structure, showing how the structures scientists and researchers use in papers and proposals fit into classical models. The book targets the internal structure of a paper, explaining how to write clear and professional sections, paragraphs, and sentences in a way that is clear and compelling.

Scientific writing is often dry, wordy, and difficult to understand. But, as Anne E. Greene shows in Writing Science in Plain English,writers from all scientific disciplines can learn to produce clear, concise prose by mastering just a few simple principles. This short, focused guide presents a dozen such principles based on what readers need in order to understand complex information, including concrete subjects, strong verbs, consistent terms, and organized paragraphs. The author, a biologist and an experienced teacher of scientific writing, illustrates each principle with real-life examples of both good and bad writing and shows how to revise bad writing to make it clearer and more concise. She ends each chapter with practice exercises so that readers can come away with new writing skills after just one sitting. Writing Science in Plain English can help writers at all levels of their academic and professional careers—undergraduate students working on research reports, established scientists writing articles and grant proposals, or agency employees working to follow the Plain Writing Act. This essential resource is the perfect companion for all who seek to write science effectively.

Writing a scientific article in English is often a major challenge for non-native speakers of the language. They not only need to produce a well-structured and coherent text, but they are also expected to use correct and idiomatic English throughout. While many books and guides deal with academic writing in general, few focus specifically on writing a scientific article, and most are not written with non-native speakers of English in mind. This guide now offers help. It provides comprehensive and practical advice for non-English graduate students (Master's and PhD) and researchers from various disciplines who wish to communicate their work effectively. It presents all the essential elements for writing a successful scientific paper: (1) getting started and structuring your thoughts; (2) structuring your paper; (3) citing sources; (4) writing well-structured and coherent paragraphs; (5) constructing effective sentences; (6) considering information placement and word order; (7) adopting the right style and using appropriate vocabulary; (8) avoiding the pitfalls of English grammar; (9) using correct spelling and punctuation. This guide is the culmination of Taalcentrum-VU's years of experience in providing clear language and communication consulting in combination with practical tools to aid the aspiring writer of scientific English.

A document may be based on accurate medical and scientific information, follow guidelines precisely, and be well written in clear and correct language, but may still fail to achieve its objectives. The strategic approach described in this book will help you to turn good medical and scientific writing into successful writing. It describes clearly and concisely how to identify the target audience and the desired outcome, and how to construct key messages for a wide spectrum of documents. Irrespective of your level of expertise and your seniority in the pharmaceutical, regulatory, or academic environment, this book is an essential addition to your supporting library. The authors share with you many years of combined experience in the pharmaceutical and academic environment and in the writing of successful outcome-driven documents.​

From Research to Manuscript, written in simple, straightforward language, explains how to understand and summarize a research project. It is a writing guide that goes beyond grammar and bibliographic formats, by demonstrating in detail how to compose the sections of a scientific paper. This book takes you from the data on your desk and leads you through the drafts and rewrites needed to build a thorough, clear science article. At each step, the book describes not only what to do but why and how. It discusses why each section of a science paper requires its particular form of information, and it shows how to put your data and your arguments into that form. Importantly, this writing manual recognizes that experiments in different disciplines need different presentations, and it is illustrated with examples from well-written papers on a wide variety of scientific subjects. As a textbook or as an individual tutorial, From Research to Manuscript belongs in the library of every serious science writer and editor.

The Craft of Scientific Presentations, 2nd edition aims to strengthen you as a presenter of science and engineering. The book does so by identifying what makes excellent presenters such as Brian Cox, Jane Goodall, Richard Feynman, and Jill Bolte Taylor so strong. In addition, the book explains what causes so many scientific presentations to flounder. One of the most valuable contributions of this text is that it teaches the assertion-evidence approach to scientific presentations. Instead of building presentations, as most engineers and scientists do, on the weak foundation of topic phrases and bulleted lists, this assertion-evidence approach calls for building presentations on succinct message assertions supported by visual evidence. Unlike the commonly followed topic-subtopic approach that PowerPoint leads presenters to use, the assertion-evidence approach is solidly grounded in research. By showing the differences between strong and weak presentations, by identifying the errors that scientific presenters typically make, and by teaching a much more powerful approach for scientific presentations than what is commonly practiced, this book places you in a position to elevate your presentations to a high level. In essence, this book aims to have you not just succeed in your scientific presentations, but excel. About the Author Michael Alley has taught workshops on presentations to engineers and scientists on five continents, and has recently been invited to speak at the European Space Organization, Harvard Medical School, MIT, Sandia National Labs, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Simula Research Laboratory, and United Technologies. An Associate Professor of engineering communication at Pennsylvania State University, Alley is a leading researcher on the effectiveness of different designs for presentation slides.

This timely and hugely practical work provides a score of examples from contemporary and historical scientific presentations to show clearly what makes an oral presentation effective. It considers presentations made to persuade an audience to adopt some course of action (such as funding a proposal) as well as presentations made to communicate information, and it considers these from four perspectives: speech, structure, visual aids, and delivery. It also discusses computer-based projections and slide shows as well as overhead projections. In particular, it looks at ways of organizing graphics and text in projected images and of using layout and design to present the information efficiently and effectively.