001. Writing scientific papers

Abstract

If you haven't written about your scientific work you might as well not have done it. But, if you haven’t written it well, you won’t have done much better because your scientific colleagues probably won’t read it. This short workshop illustrates an approach to structuring scientific papers that encourages readers to find and retain the important information that you wish them to read. It demonstrates that logical structure is even more important than style and shows how to organize the structure of a paper around the scientific hypothesis on which the work was based. The hypothesis is a statement of what might plausibly have been expected from the experiment before it was done and that expectation can be used to describe the experiment in a way that induces readers to anticipate what they are about to read. This anticipation not only persuades them to read on but enhances their chances of retaining the information that they pick up when they do.