How to organise Writing
Alex Julebo
Wednesday, 21 May 2008 17:51 UTC
I am sorry if you donot like my Question. I am completely new to scientific writing but i want to be good in this skill. Soon i will start to write my paper so i would like to get maximum benefit from this forum. my simple question is
1) How to organise writing task.
After getting the reply i would like to ask more but first i want to know from experts how they are performing this difficult task.
-
Replies
Jump to resultsResults
-
I would also like guidance. I have read Nature and very much would like to participate in discussion of new approaches and theory. However, I am not involved in reseach or acedemia but I think that I can contribute. I have been able to successfully treat(with a M.D. approval) interstitial cystitis, and 2 cases of gential herpes. Yet, I do not have the sophistication or the art of scientific writing to present my theory for acceptance. I am not sure that one can learn the refinement of writing through a computer based forum.
Sincerely,
Norman A. Smith
-
I can agree with you but not the 100 percent. Computer based forum are very helpful for any topic, either its cooking recepie or the writing articles. These forums are to listen the expert views and experiences, it can refine your skill, but donot consider a person who is asking question here is just depending on the computer forum, its like an exercise that before going to class you already read some thing about the focus topic so one can understand maximum when you have the real or eye to eye contact with speaker.
-
An excellent starting point that is often recommended to young scientists is The Elements of Style, By W. Strunk. Although it was not specifically intended for scientific research, it covers some key points of text composition in English language. Plus, it is nice and succinct.
Let’s also see what others may suggest. -
thanks for nice piece of information. I will wait for others as well to get maximum benefit from the intellectual community here.
-
Apologies for being slighly late to reply. Nature Publishing Group provides some writing advice at our Author and Reviewers’ website here
As well as the advice itself, you can find links on that page to other free resources, including the Elements of Style referred to here by Massimo, and an Editorial in Nature Physics (with, coincidentally the same title!).
I hope you find this web page and associated resources helpful.To Norman: I understand your desire to become involved but papers in the Nature journals are by professional scientists. We would not in principle publish articles about new theories and approaches for medical treatment, as they are out of scope of the journals (you can see a statement of each Nature journal’s aims and scope at the home page of the journal).
-
Writing a good scientific paper is difficult. Some people have a talent for it and other people (like me) have to work on it very hard. But one can learn it.
The most important things are discipline, patience and respect for your audience (readers). I suppose that whatever you write you want people to be able to understand it. And to understand it quickly. Practice with all your correspondence, including email and forum posts, to write as clearly as possible. So, for instance no deliberate spelling errors out of laziness and no useless capitals.
Ad Lagendijk
sciencesurvivalblog -
Thanks for the reply. Writing is really very difficult task and for me i am just at the first step but i would like to go ahead. I want to ask
one very simple question about the writing.1) whats the better form of the sentence, active voice or passive voice
1.a) Second sometimes authors used very diffilut words or strange words in their piece of writing but once in the complete article, from where one can find such type of words.
I shall be very thankful to you for replying these kidish questions
-
Alex, these are not childish questions at all, far from it.
I’d recommend the active voice (see the webpage to which I link in my reply above), and using simple language. If you read a word in someone else’s paper that is not defined, there are good dictionaries and thesauri (OED online, Websters, Chambers, Wikipedia etc) available, or use a keyword search in a specialist database such as pubmed, scopus or google scholar. -
I was going to quote Strunk and White’s recommendation to use the active voice, and it’s nice to read that a Nature editor agrees.
-
I haven’t seen this advice offered, but I think it is critical:
If you want to write, read. Norman, if you want to write up your hypothesis and the results that support it, you need to read up on what other treatments have been proposed (since you will be expected to compare yours to these in the discussion, to discuss its advantages and drawbacks). Always, a scientific paper has a structure that requires results to be presented in their context.
Many biomedical articles – not the majority – are available through PubMed Central and through individual publishers taking the initiative to make older articles accessible to the public (I wish Nature Publishing Group would do this!).
Just as if you wanted to write a sonnet, a particular form of poetry, you would read many examples of sonnets, so you should read many examples of scientific articles (that applies to Alex as well). This way, you will see that within a given acceptable form of presentation (acceptable for the scientific community) there is a certain degree of liberty.
Start by searching for articles in fields of interest by entering your keywords in PubMed. This now offers links out to the articles, and if you are at a subscribing institution, you can connect directly to their text. Otherwise you can probably go to your local medical school library and negotiate access to the physical journals.
If you are in a different discipline, there are probably equivalent ways to search for articles in your field of interest. Then, start by emulating the style and structure of the articles you find most compelling.
Alex, I would also say that in organizing your scientific writing, start with your data and figures and try to tell a story in images. Then write up your results (and only your results) in a narrative manner in the same order.
Results
-
