Molecular Biology AI Manual

Providing Guidelines for Scientific Writing

Scientists rely heavily on good writing skills for such crucial aspects of their work as grant proposals, journal articles, books and so on. Therefore, it is important to help your students develop not only as scientists but also as scientific writers. Scientific writing has two main purposes. It provides an opportunity to reflect on your experiments and what your results mean, and it is necessary for communicating what you have learned to others.

Tips to Help Your Students Become Better Scientific Writers:
1) Avoid jargon - explain terms that are important, and/or unfamiliar to the audience.

2) Don't change tenses at random. The results section, in general, should be in the past tense. You've done the experiments already. When you're discussing things in a broader context, as in the introduction and discussion, the present tense is sometimes appropriate.

3) In scientific writing, passive voice is the accepted standard. Writing in passive voice serves to put the emphasis on the experiments that were done rather than on the people who carried them out. However, for beginning labs it may be more productive to have students write in the active voice ("We measured out..."). This may prevent students from burying their actions and errors in convoluted "scientific" writing.

4) Tables that are clearly labeled are useful for presenting numerical data.

5) More is not necessarily better. Extraneous details make the logic of the experiment harder to follow. Do not repeat yourself, re-wording what was just said in a slightly different way. If you think something you wrote is ambiguous and needs to be clarified, erase it and start the sentence over.

6) Be sure to tell a consistent story, in a logical order, focusing on the point that is most important. Start at the beginning and end at the end ( what's the question? what's your approach to answering the question? how did you implement the approach? what data did you get and what do they indicate about the answer to your question? what future work might you do to address unanswered questions?)

7) Be sure to keep results, discussion, etc. in the proper places. The results section is just what you found and enough of how you found it to make a coherent story. The only time you should include interpretations of your data in the results section is if you need to explain why one result led to another experiment. The discussion tells what your results mean, how they compare to previous results, and what may account for differences between your results and previously published results.

8) The lab report is not only a vehicle for reporting results but also for explaining possible sources of error and the extent to which these sources may have affected the results. Such discussion demonstrates an understanding of the material.

9) Use knowledge acquired in lecture, prior lab experiments and background scientific literature as you draw conclusions about the current project.

10) Read as many journals as possible to become familiar with the writing style.

The Lab Report
The following section was prepared for undergraduates as a guide to writing lab reports.

Science is a process. This process is hard to fully understand unless it is experienced first hand. Performing good science requires practice of both the mental and the physical processed involved. Too often in course work, the mental and the physical processes of science become separated. Lecture courses become mental and labs become physical. This is unfortunate because is does not help you understand what science is really about. Lecture courses, by nature, cannot accommodate the physical processes of science and are, therefore, hopelessly cerebral. The laboratory experience, however, can accommodate both aspects and should ask you not only to do the mechanics, but to also do the cerebral processes. The lab report is a tool through which you practice the cerebral elements of science.

What is the cerebral process? Simply put, it is to question, to analyze, to conclude, and to state. In other words it is to produce a thought. This thought attempts to answer a question by evaluating knowledge gained from experience. The lab report stretches the thinking process by allowing you to communicate your thoughts to others. When you effectively communicate your thoughts to others, you are accomplishing two things: you are educating the reader and you are learning the discipline of good science. You most certainly have had someone tell you that good writing is essential for good thinking. It is not important whether or not you believe this, but it is important for you to realize that good writing is essential for you to do well in science. More immediately, writing a good lab report is essential for you to do well in a laboratory course.

So, what is a lab report? Let's start by saying what a lab report is not. A lab report is not a notebook. A notebook is what you record your thoughts and your data in. A notebook is written to yourself so that you can keep track of what you have done and what you plan to do. The purpose of a notebook is to remind. A notebook does not need to be organized logically and in fact most are organized chronologically, listing events as they happened. Nobody needs to understand your notebook except for yourself. This should sound very different from a lab report but often in producing a lab report the distinction becomes blurred.

The purpose of a lab report is to inform. A lab report is to be written for an uninformed audience. It is written in order to communicate your thoughts to another person who knows nothing, or very little, of what you have been doing. After reading your lab report, that person should have an understanding of what you have done, why you did it, and what you have learned. The reader, unfortunately, does not have your notebook or your experiences to aid in understanding your lab report, the reader has only what is on the page. This is what differentiates the lab report from the notebook. The lab report cannot be a list of events or thoughts, but must be a logically organized presentation of your thoughts, experiments and conclusions. This is what the reader expects!

Probably the most important, single expectation that the reader has when reading your lab report is that the reader expects the information to be organized. More specifically, the reader expects to find certain information in certain places. What the reader wants to know more that anything else when picking up a lab report to read is "what's the point? Why should I read this?" Therefore, the first thing a reader should find in a lab report is a statement that tells the reader what the report is about. If the report is answering questions in the lab manual, the first thing the reader should find is the answer.

Once the reader is introduced to the subject, the reader wants to know what the facts are. What is the evidence which led you to make such a statement? When answering a question, after stating the answer, you should then tell the reader what information was essential for formulating that answer. Having read your statement, and your evidence, the reader is now informed enough to understand what you think about the topic.

The reader expects to find a discussion at the end of a lab report. The discussion can include alternative explanations, conclusions, error analysis, or even speculations. What is important to remember is that you present your discussion to the reader after stating the purpose, and providing the evidence.

The secondary concern of the reader is that the report be well written. Organization is essential but is worthless without the foundation of proper writing. The expectations of the reader are simple. Use complete sentences. Use correct spelling and punctuation. Write (or type!) legibly. You are in college now and everyone knows you have learned these skills. You are writing for an uninformed reader, not for yourself and the reader expects a lab report that is readable.