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 Similes “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