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The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Writing Center

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The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill's Writing Center

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Tips for writing scientific reports

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Contains a link to writing a lab report

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The basic principles of good writing apply just as well to the sciences as they do to the humanities and the social sciences. A science paper should be written in a clear and concise style, its paragraphs should be coherent, and its ideas should be well organized. This handout focuses on the features of science writing that distinguish it from other, non-scientific genres. Since some of these features may vary from subject to subject, it focuses on those principles and conventions that are common to most areas of science. Understanding how the distinctive features of science writing reflect the activities and goals of science will help you become a more proficient writer of scientific prose.

Audience

All writers should be aware of their audience. But science writers need to be particularly aware because readers of science-related writing can have very different levels of knowledge. The key question to ask is always, Am I writing for fellow scientists or for a general audience? What your readers know or do not know will have a significant effect on both substance and style.

Titles

Titles in humanities and social science papers are, as a rule, sentence fragments. In science papers they can be either fragments or full sentences, though usually they are fragments:

The risk of lymphoma development in autoimmune diseases: a meta-analysis

A full-sentence title is good at highlighting one central result:

Brain natriuretic peptide is a potentially useful screening tool for the detection of cardiovascular disease in patients with rheumatoid arthritis.

As this example illustrates, titles in the sciences can be long. Do your best to make sure that every word counts. Be concrete, but avoid excessive detail.

Some titles are framed as questions, which can succinctly identify just what the authors aim to discover:

Are there schizophrenics for whom drugs may be unnecessary or contraindicated?

Headings

If you write a humanities essay in university, you will not be encouraged to use headings. The opposite will be true of your science papers. Headings emphasize the systematic nature of scientific enquiry. They also provide an excellent organizational tool, often relieving you of the need to create smooth transitions between the main parts of your paper. Take advantage of them!

In some scientific genres, the sections and heading names are predetermined. For example, scientific studies as well as lab reports are typically divided into the following sections: Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion. The list may vary slightly according to the discipline, the course, or the journal. For complicated experiments, you may subdivide sections into subsections, each with its own subheading. (To learn more about writing up experiments, visit our handout on the lab report.)

Headings are not always obligatory. In a shorter paper, they may sometimes prove more of a hindrance than a help. Use them only if you find that they actually help you to better organize the material.

Jargon

The word jargon generally refers to language that is unrecognizable to most people, either because it is deliberately obscure and needlessly difficult, or because it forms part of the technical terminology common to a discipline. The first type of jargon should be avoided whatever discipline you are writing in. It can sound pretentious, and it obscures meaning. The second type of jargon does not carry the same negative connotation. In the sciences, and sometimes in other disciplines as well, this technical language can be indispensable. Consider the following passage from a fourth-year geology paper on competing theories about the extinction of the dinosaurs:

The cretaceous period was a time of great change for land plants. It is thought to have seen the origin of the angiosperms, which exploded in diversity and prominence through the period. It was also a period which saw large numbers of extinctions. These are extremely well documented in the fossil record of marine organisms, and less so for land plants. At or near the end of the cretaceous period, groups such as dinosaurs, belemnites, rudist bivalves, ammonites, and many others went extinct.

The intended audience for this paper consists of fellow geologists. The writer can thus count on her readers to know what each of the technical terms means. She does not use jargon here to make her writing sound sophisticated; outside of the scientific terms, the language is simple. The main function of such jargon is compression. The dictionary definition of each of these terms is two or three lines long. If the paper had provided definitions, it would have been considerably longer, and the flow of the argument would have suffered.

Science writing commonly relies on a further form of compression: replacing frequently used terms consisting of more than one word with an abbreviation, typically formed from the term's initial letters. The convention is to specify the abbreviation in parentheses immediately after the first use of the term:

The incidence of acute otitis media (AOM), one of the most common diagnoses among children, appears to be increasing. Data from the National Ambulatory Medical Care Surveys (NAMCS) indicate that the number of office visits for otitis media increased more than twofold from 1975 to 1990. Although the NAMCS does not differentiate between AOM and otitis media with effusion, the majority of these cases are believed to represent AOM. ( Pediatrics 108:239)

If you are writing about science for non-scientists, you can still rely on jargon to achieve compression, but you should at least let your reader know what any uncommon term means the first time around. Try to avoid abbreviations, however, unless they are commonly used (e.g., AIDS for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome).

Sometimes you may think jargon is necessary in your science writing when it is not. Rather than achieving concision, such jargon will usually make your prose long-winded and even impenetrable. Is there any good reason for a sentence like the following?

Members of the medical establishment are not presently cognizant of efficacious treatments resulting in the complete elimination of symptomatology in acute viral nasopharyngitis.

Why not simply say this?

There is no known cure for the common cold.

Always ask if there is a simpler, more transparent way of making a point.

At the same time, train yourself to read critically the language in published scientific work. If some of the sentences leave you confused, then the science may be intrinsically difficult, the writing may be weak, the ideas themselves may be confused, or the writer may be trying to gloss over something. Unraveling an unclear sentence can sometimes provide important insight into the problems with someone else's argument. Moreover, developing your critical reading skills will help you to grow as a writer.

To learn more about how to write in clear and concise manner, visit our handout on wordiness.

Passive versus Active Voice

In humanities and many social science papers, students should try to use active voice whenever possible. But historically the sciences have often encouraged the use of passive voice. There's a reason for this tradition. Passive voice helps emphasize the objectivity of the sciences:

The element radon was discovered in 1900.

This stress on objectivity makes especially good sense in the context of a lab report: after all, the experiment is not about you but about what you did.

Nevertheless, in the past several years there has been a movement in the sciences away from the passive voice. One reason for this is a philosophical shift in our thinking about science: we are more ready to acknowledge the role of the observer or investigator in the shaping of knowledge. In fact, many journals editors have responded to a growing demand for greater transparency in science by requiring that published scientific papers clearly identify the role and the source of funding of each contributor. Active voice does a much better job of emphasizing agency-the idea that every action has an actor. The other good reason behind this growing preference for active voice is stylistic: often passive voice is simply more awkward, less direct, and less clear.

Learn some simple sentence patterns that will help your writing benefit fully from the directness of active voice. For example, refer to figures, tables, and equations at the beginning of the sentence rather than at the end.

Figure 1 illustrates the quadratic relationship between distance and velocity.

Do the same with words and phrases such as "results," "studies", and "evidence":

Experimental evidence shows that the typical dose-response curve has an inverted J-shape.

If you are referring to a technique or procedure, you can also achieve greater directness by making it the subject of your sentence:

PCR analysis produced clones of the toxin B DNA originally isolated in cultures of C. difficile from hospital patients.

And even though your course instructor may dissuade you from using "I" or "we," do not shy away from placing other scientists in the subject position:

Peto provided a detailed description of the logrank test in his 1977 article on the use of survival analysis in long-term randomized trials.

Note that even the use of the first-person pronouns, "I" and "we," is becoming more acceptable in scientific discourse. Course instructors, TAs, and journal editors may all take different positions on this question. The only way to be sure is to ask. When "I" or "we" is not allowed, the passive voice is sometimes unavoidable.

Even in disciplines where both active voice and first-person pronouns are acceptable, the rules may be different for lab reports, at least for the Methods section. Lab instructors in some disciplines still insist on passive voice (in past tense) throughout that section: in other words, they do not accept any active constructions, even if you avoid using "I" and "we." But a growing number of courses have followed the lead of journals by accepting first-person active constructions even in the Methods section. If you're writing a lab report and you're not sure of the rules, consult your lab manual or your TA. Whatever the rules for your course, be careful to comply. But remember that such rules usually apply only to the Methods section. Don't let the habits you cultivate for that specific part of a lab report hamper you unnecessarily in the rest of your science writing.

To learn more about voice in academic writing, visit our handout on passive voice. Also visit our page on how to use active voice in the sciences.

Tense

The two most common tenses in science papers are present and past. Future and present perfect rank a distant third and fourth.

Use present tense when you are making assertions about nature or about concepts:

Turtles are bigger than beetles.

Use past tense when you are describing what you or someone else did or asserted:

Darwin observed the difference in adaptability between turtles and beetles.

Use future tense when you lay out your plan in a proposal:

In my final project, I will compare survival strategies in turtles and beetles.

Note that the use of first-person singular is often appropriate in a proposal.

Use present perfect when you are describing what you have done repeatedly in the past continuing up to the present:

Over the past several months I have collected data on turtles and beetles.

Observe that we can mix tenses in a single sentence, and indeed we often need to:

Darwin observed that beetles are more adaptable than turtles.

The use of past tense in describing someone else's work is one key difference between science and the humanities. In the humanities, when we are describing what a writer, an artist, or a scholar asserted, we think of ourselves as engaging in a conversation that takes place in the eternal present:

Shakespeare compares the poet's lover to a summer's day.

The one exception would be when the emphasis is on history, in which case the past tense is called for:

Shakespeare wrote many of his tragedies during a period of great political instability.

The sciences see the contribution of any individual as adding progressively to an ordered sequence of investigations. The past tense helps convey a sense of this temporal progression.

References

The practices in the sciences for integrating sources into one's own work differ from practices in the humanities. Science writing, particularly report writing, relies largely on summary, which involves conveying only the key points from someone else's work. Scientists do not generally rely on direct quotation, and this is especially true of report writing. Paraphrase can also occur, when the analysis of someone else's work requires close attention to detail, and it can be an important tool in more discursive forms of science writing than reports. For example, a critique of the way eugenicists adapted Darwinian ideas in the last four decades of the nineteenth century might involving paraphrasing and closely analyzing specific passages in the works of influential eugenic theorists from that period.

The conventions for citing sources also differ in the sciences. Science courses rely increasingly on the citation-sequence system of referencing. The details may differ slightly depending on your discipline, but generally you list references on a separate page at the end of the paper in numerical sequence according to the order in which sources are cited in the paper, rather than in alphabetical order. In the body, you insert the reference number in the appropriate place (within parentheses or as a superscript), repeating a previous number if you have already cited the same source earlier. The citation-sequence system minimizes clutter and allows readers to find references quickly.

Some science courses rely on the name-year system. Like the APA system commonly used in the social sciences, this system lists sources alphabetically and places a greater emphasis on dates than the citation-sequence and the MLA systems do. Though less streamlined than the citation-sequence system, the name-year system offers two advantages: it produces more easily searchable and therefore more useful reference lists, and it lets the reader know in the body of the paper when studies were performed.

Check with your TA or your course handbook to find out what your course requires.

To learn more about providing references in academic writing, visit our handout on standard documentation formats.

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The basic principles of good writing apply just as well to the sciences as they do to the humanities and the social sciences. A science paper should be written in a clear and concise style, its paragraphs should be coherent, and its ideas should be well organized.

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Take a look at any of the articles in this SA. Read through the writer's eyes: what do you notice about structure? Voice? Visuals? Headlines? Headings? Word choice? All of this is what you will teach students.

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Scientific American is the essential guide to the most awe-inspiring advances in science and technology, explaining how they change our understanding of the world and shape our lives.

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Click on this link to the online journal, New Scientist. Take a look at a couple of article and see what you notice in terms of organization/structure, including headings and subheadings; voice; use of visuals of any sort; and whatever else captures your attention. What you notice will probably be what you teach your students.

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New Scientist | Science news, articles, and features

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Science news and long reads from expert journalists, covering developments in science, technology, health and the environment on the website and the magazine.

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A power point presentation

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How to teach students to think like a scientist

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How to teach students to think like a scientist

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Halloween is a magical time of year. Ghosts and goblins wander the streets in search of candy and mischief. Halloween revelers celebrate the supernatural. School children color pictures of witches, gross each other out with mystery boxes containing brains made from noodles and boiled-egg-eyes, and play mad scientists creating bubbling beakers of goo. It is great fun...and my goal with this post is not to kill that fun!

A few days ago, I received an e-mail from a commercial science supply company with a list of neat Halloween "experiments." I couldn't help but be irritated as I read through the directions. Sure, they were fun activities, but experiments? Nothing was being tested. The explanations claimed that the reactions were "magical." They are shallow activities that horribly misrepresent the process of science. I should let it slide because it is Halloween. However, the reality is that I run across these types of "experiments" from commercial vendors and web-based lesson collections almost daily. Textbooks portray the "scientific method" as the one way that all scientists explore the world -- moving cleanly from asking a question, to experimentation, to making a conclusion.

Teaching Students to Think Like Scientists

If we want our students to think like scientists, we need to explicitly teach the nature of science. Jerrid Kruse, a science educator and Drake University, states:

The Nature of Science (NOS) is not something teachers should teach, it is something teachers DO teach. Teachers who are not actively trying to teach nature of science concepts accurately are not simply ignoring NOS, they are likely implicitly teaching inaccuracies about NOS. For example, a teacher who uses cookbook laboratory procedures is teaching students that science is a step-by-step process. Or, consider a teacher who consistently uses the phrase "the data tells." This teacher is painting a deterministic picture of science in which scientists are objective arbitrators between data and truth. Instead, we ought be having students developing their own procedures whenever possible and carefully considering how our language in the classroom sends powerful messages about what science is and how science works.

Teaching the nature of science moves beyond the simplistic scientific method and seeks to portray science more authentically as a creative, social process of understanding the natural world.

Science Seeks to Explain the Natural World

The movie, The Gods Must be Crazy, opens in a documentary style describing the culture of a tribe that has remained isolated from "civilization." They explain the sound of airplanes as the rumbling of the gods' stomachs, complete with evidence of the gods' passing gas.

Credit: Source: Zi-Dan's Flickr Photostream

Tom Clark, Director of the Center for Naturalism writes, "As scientific understandings have matured, many features of the natural world that were thought to be explainable only by some supernatural agency have lost that attribute. Thunder is no longer considered as the sound of galloping stallions ridden by the gods of the Pantheon."

This aspect is central to understanding science and separates science from other ways that we seek to understand our world.

The Simplified, Linear Scientific Method vs. Reality

Almost every science textbook starts with a chapter on "The Scientific Method." The scientific method is usually defined as a series of steps - Problem, Hypothesis, Experimentation, Observation, Conclusion - that grossly simplify the scientific process. Berkeley's Understanding Science website explains:

An experiment is one specific way that scientists seek to test ideas, but it is not the only way. An experiment seeks to uncover the relationship between variables by observing the affect of manipulating one aspect of a system while keeping the others constant. Other ways of testing ideas include identifying patterns, classifying, longitudinal observations, and modeling.

Science is a Social Endeavor

Science is not done in isolation from society. It is an activity that is impacted by and has an impact on society. Many textbooks and popular accounts of science discoveries simplify the process by highlighting an individual instead of the group. The perception of a lone scientist working in isolation is rarely accurate and damaging to students' attitudes towards science.

Earlier in this post, I quoted Kruse cautioning against portraying scientists as arbiters between data and truth. Instead, the scientific process requires creativity and intuition. Project 2061's groundbreaking book, Science for All Americans, states:

The use of logic and the close examination of evidence are necessary but not usually sufficient for the advancement of science. Scientific concepts do not emerge automatically from data or from any amount of analysis alone. Inventing hypotheses or theories to imagine how the world works and then figuring out how they can be put to the test of reality is as creative as writing poetry, composing music, or designing skyscrapers. Sometimes discoveries in science are made unexpectedly, even by accident. But knowledge and creative insight are usually required to recognize the meaning of the unexpected.

Teaching the Nature of Science

There are many resources available for helping students deepen their understanding of the process of science. It is important to make these aspects of science explicit to our students. Kruse suggests:

Black-box activities are a great way to introduce NOS ideas. When solving puzzles, students don't have to be concerned with difficult science content, so they are better able to reflect on their process. Importantly, we must encourage our students to reflect on their process. Asking questions like "How did you use creativity to solve this puzzle?" and "How do you think scientists use creativity?" are necessary to focus student thinking on NOS ideas.

Our consideration of NOS cannot end with black-box activities. When students conduct their own investigations (inquiry-based instruction), they should be encouraged to link their process to the strategies used with the puzzles. By reflecting on their own investigations of the natural world, students are more likely to internalize NOS ideas rather than dismiss them as not reflecting real science.

To push students a bit further, have students read or hear about real scientists. When students read about how real scientists do/did their work, they are provided evidence that real science works in ways they discussed earlier when solving puzzles and conducting investigations.

The simplified, linear scientific method implies that scientific studies follow an unvarying, linear recipe. ?But in reality, in their work, scientists engage in many different activities in many different sequences. Scientific investigations often involve repeating the same steps many times to account for new information and ideas.

The simplified, linear scientific method implies that science is done by individual scientists working through these steps in isolation. ?But in reality, science depends on interactions within the scientific community. Different parts of the process of science may be carried out by different people at different times.

?The simplified, linear scientific method implies that science has little room for creativity. ?But in reality, the process of science is exciting, dynamic, and unpredictable. Science relies on creative people thinking outside the box!

The simplified, linear scientific method implies that science concludes. ?But in reality, scientific conclusions are always revisable if warranted by the evidence. Scientific investigations are often ongoing, raising new questions even as old ones are answered.

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By scaffolding students from puzzles to their own investigation to learning about the investigations of real scientists, we can help them deepen their understanding of NOS and help them see science as a highly creative, dynamic, social and human endeavor.

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How to Teach Students to Think Like Scientists | Edutopia

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Halloween is a magical time of year. Ghosts and goblins wander the streets in search of candy and mischief. Halloween revelers celebrate the supernatural. School children color pictures of witches, gross each other out with mystery boxes containing brains made from noodles and boiled-egg-eyes, and play mad scientists creating bubbling beakers of goo.

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How a teacher taught students to write like a scientist

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How a teacher taught students to write like a scientist

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Choice Literacy - Articles & Videos - Full Article

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When I transitioned from 18 years as a primary teacher to a 4th grade classroom, I started thinking about how I could use the same successful strategies for launching writing workshop to support my students as I introduced science notebooks.

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I'm following up on yesterday's post on where scientists learn how to write (and please, keep those comments coming).

First, Chad Orzel has a nice post about how he learned to write like a scientist. It involves torturing drafts on the rack, and you owe it to yourself to read it.

Second, I'll be putting up a post tonight about the best scientific writing assignment ever, at least in my graduate school experience. It's one more professors teaching graduate students might consider adapting.

In the meantime, I want to throw out a set of factors that probably make a difference in the process of helping scientists learn to write. (Use the comments to add factors I've forgotten.)

Learning how to write like professional scientists write and learning how to write well aren't always the same thing. There are a whole lot of papers in peer reviewed journals that are not models of clear communication. Point this out to students - identifying examples of bad writing as well as examples of good writing - might be useful in getting the next generation of scientists to raise the bar.

Putting the necessary components of a scientific communication where your reader expects to find them may be at least as important as describing them in lucid prose. Maybe this is a side effect of the amount of bad writing out there in the literature - scientists are reasonably good at harvesting the information they want as long as it's where they expect it to be in the Background, Materials and Methods, Results, Discussion, or other canonical paper section.

When your own grasp of the material you're writing about is not strong, it's not uncommon for your prose to fall apart. This is something writing teachers see frequently in the classroom. If your students really know the subject about which they're writing, their command of the language seems better than when they are confused by it - the confusion seems to lower the mechanics of the writing a few pegs. Knowing this may help those charged with helping scientists-in-training learn how to write choose assignments where it's easier to focus on the writing.

In many academic contexts, a student's writing may be less focused on communicating and more focused on obscuring areas where understanding is still fuzzy. Think lab reports. It's worth finding a way to break students of the habit of viewing writing tasks as butt-covering maneuvers .

Journal articles and grant proposals are not the only things scientists need to be able to write well. There are emails to collaborators, and lab notebooks, just to name two. These have different goals and different audiences, and attending to the differences can be useful in shaping the writing.

Communicating clearly is hard. This is true even for the people we think of as excellent writers, and it's especially true when what you're trying to communicate is complicated or new.

More on this soon!

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Learning to write like a scientist: factors worth noting.

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I'm following up on yesterday's post on where scientists learn how to write (and please, keep those comments coming). First, Chad Orzel has a nice post about how he learned to write like a scientist. It involves torturing drafts on the rack, and you owe it to yourself to read it.