Audience: We should always consider the purpose of
the writing, the audience it is destined to and the form
we are going to give to it (be it an article, a journal, an
online publication, newsletter, blog, grant application,
etc.). The audience will demand clear communication in
order to avoid misunderstandings or ending up ignoring
the contents of the publication, because the audience is
not reading for entertainment but to increase
understanding and scientific knowledge. The audience of
a scientific writing will usually be other fellow scientists.
English in SW
9 Kinds of words: English is really
simple which has 9 kinds of
words (or parts of speech). In
other words, out of all the
thousands of words there are in
English, all of them could be
placed in 9 different categories.
4 kinds of phrases and 2 kinds of clauses:
after knowing about these 9 word
categories, one should only know how to
group these words into phrases and
clauses
6 kinds of sentences: after
combining phrases and clauses
into sentences, these sentences
can fall into 6 possible types
Organization
Organization: this is a key element to
avoid problems because “confused
thinking leads to confused writing”, so the
path to simplicity begins with the
organization of one’s thoughts.
IMRAD (or Introduction, Methods, Results
and Discussion): this is the most common
type of organization used for scientific
papers. Another kind can be IRDAM
Communication: for communication to
occur we need to broadcast information but
also to make sure it is received and
understood and it all should be done
through clear writing
Before writing a
Scientific article,
one must:
1. establish the purpose of the written piece 2. determine
de audience 3. list all ideas and key points one would like to
include 4. group related ideas and arrange materials in
subsections from general to specific or from known to
unknown. 5. start by listing major categories of information
in a logical way (using IMRAD format for scientific papers)
6. list two or more subordinate concepts or categories of
information (if one category has a much larger number of
subcategories, one may need to break it into two or more
categories) 7. use letter or Roman numeral systems
(though one should not worry much about this unless we
are working on a large document or book) 8. use indent,
bullets or hyphens to identify subcategories.
and finally
1. when the outline is completed, one should revise it and
look at it critically to make sure it makes sense.
2. Complex concepts: they should be presented step by
step, from general to specific and from the known to the
unknown 3. Discussions: they may follow the opposite
path, that is, from specific to general 4. Road maps:
create one and follow it as a way to make sure you will
not lose any readers along the way