Writing in the Sciences and Engineering
General Resources
Writing for the Sciences Workshop Videos: Recorded GWC workshops focusing on writing in the sciences and engineering, such as dissertation proposals, journal articles, and article-based dissertations.
UCLA Statistical Consulting: UCLA Statistical Consulting offers a variety of services, including seminars and workshops on various statistical computing topics and walk-in statistics help.
Writing in the Sciences: This course, provided by Stanford University, is free to audit through Coursera. It addresses general writing strategies as well as best practices for writing a scientific manuscript.
Communicating Science: ComSciCon is a workshop series organized by graduate students, focused on science communication skills. This professional development opportunity allows graduate students to engage with journalists and educators in technical communication from across the country and create original science communication pieces for publication. There are workshops with chapters throughout the country, and the Southwest chapter is currently under development.
The New Oxford Dictionary for Scientific Writers and Editors: This searchable reference dictionary for scientists gives special attention to commonly accepted spellings, punctuation, and abbreviation of key scientific terms, and includes vocabulary not present in conventional dictionaries.
Alley, M. (2018). The craft of scientific writing (4th ed.). Springer.
Eberle, M. E. (2013). Paraphrasing, plagiarism, and misrepresentation in scientific writing.Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science, 157-167.
Written by Mark Eberle of the Department of Biological Sciences at Fort Hays State University, this paper discusses the continuum from plagiarism to misrepresentation and gives useful examples of correct paraphrasing that avoid both extremes.
Glasman-Deal, H. (2020). Science research writing: for native and non-native speakers of English. World Scientific.
Heard, S. B. (2022).The scientist's guide to writing: How to write more easily and effectively throughout your scientific career (2nd ed.). Princeton University Press.
Genres of Scientific Writing
Theses and Dissertations
UCLA Thesis and Dissertation Filing Requirements: This PDF file contains all the official details about preparation and submission of a thesis or dissertation so that it will be accepted by the UCLA Division of Graduate Education. Read it carefully! You should also attend a filing workshop, which presents much of the information in the PDF, before you plan to file (we recommend attending the quarter before you plan to file), so keep an eye on the workshop schedule.
Dissertations: This page, from the UNC Chapel Hill Writing Center, offers suggestions for managing and successfully completing the dissertation process. It focuses more on lifestyle and psychological issues than writing tips, but these may be more of a challenge for dissertation writers than the research and writing themselves!
Bell, D. J., Foster, S. L., & Cone, J. D. (2020). Dissertations and theses from start to finish: Psychology and related fields. American Psychological Association.
Fisher, E. M., & Thompson, R. C. (2014). Enjoy writing your science thesis or dissertation!: a step-by-step guide to planning and writing a thesis or dissertation for undergraduate and graduate science students (2nd ed.). Imperial College Press.
Lovitts, B. E., & Wert, E. L. (2008). Developing quality dissertations in the sciences: A graduate student’s guide to achieving excellence. Stylus Publishing. A concise booklet designed to define and explain expectations for dissertations in the sciences.
Journal Articles
How to Write a Paper in Scientific Journal Style and Format: While this site is primarily targeted towards undergraduate writers first learning the scientific writing style, it contains useful basic information about how to construct a scientific article. Developed by Greg Anderson of Bates College, it utilizes many examples to compare more and less effective ways of writing each section of the paper.
WAC Clearinghouse. This website from the WAC Clearinghouse gives an overview of writing a scientific paper for publication.
Writing and Publishing a Scientific Paper: Written by Joe Wolfe, Professor of Physics at the University of New South Wales, this webpage provides valuable advice on how to write a scientific article and get it published.
Making the Right Moves: A Practical Guide to Scientific Management for Postdocs and New Faculty (2nd ed.). (2006). Published by Howard Hughes Medical Institute and Burroughs Wellcome Fund.
This publication has a chapter on publishing journal articles (chapter 10) as well has helpful chapters on project management and data management (chapters 7 and 8). Other chapters focus on the academic job market and early academic career challenges.
Schimel, J. (2012). Writing science: How to write papers that get cited and proposals that get funded. Oxford University Press.
In this book, Schimel explains how to do scientific writing well by integrating narrative (storytelling) features from fiction into the structure of scientific papers and proposals. The book also spends considerable time explaining the nuts and bolts of how to make scientific prose clear and effective.
Posters and Presentations
Rethinking the Design of Presentation Slides: In this PowerPoint presentation, Michael Alley (Penn State College of Engineering) offers suggestions for improving the impact and comprehension of scientific results presented through PowerPoint slides.
Presentation Tips. This website, by Garr Reynolds, Professor of Management & Communication Design at Kansai Gaidai University in Osaka, provides tips on professional presentation, including numerous suggestions for content, slide design, and presentation style. Reynolds has written multiple books on presentations, and there are additional resources available on his blog Presentation Zen.
Creating Effective Poster Presentations: This site focuses on how to design scientific posters so that they deliver the greatest impact, with specific recommendations for layout, text, images, color, etc.
Guidelines for Giving a Poster Presentation: This page, written for the American Society of Primatologists, includes suggestions for poster design but also poster presentation – how to effectively discuss your poster at a professional conference.
Alley, M. (2013). The craft of scientific presentations: Critical steps to succeed and critical errors to avoid (2nd ed.). Springer.
This book PDF may be downloaded from the website linked in the reference, and there are supplemental resources on the Design of Scientific Posters available with specific stylistic suggestions for effective poster design, as well as numerous examples of well-designed posters and downloadable PowerPoint templates for posters of various sizes.
Grant and Fellowship Proposals
Be sure to review the general resources on Writing Fellowship and Grant Proposals.
Advice on Writing Proposals to the National Science Foundation: Written by Susan Finger, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, this page offers concrete suggestions for those submitting grant proposals to NSF.
U.S. National Institutes of Health Grant Writing Tutorials: The NIH is the primary funding agency for biomedical research in the US. These pages include links to various helpful NIH publications and websites dedicated to preparing successful applications to various Institutes within the NIH.
Grant Proposals (Or Give Me the Money!): From the UNC Chapel Hill Writing Center, this handout describes the grant writing process and provides specific suggestions to improving the argument in your proposal, as well as useful examples for how to present budgets and timelines.
Friedland, A. J., & Folt, C. L. (2018). Writing successful science proposals (3rd ed.). Yale University Press.
Writing in Specific Scientific Fields
Biological Sciences
Review Paper for the Biological Sciences: This online guide, from the WAC Clearinghouse, focuses on the parameters and challenges of writing a review paper in the biological sciences.
Engineering Sciences
Writing Engineering Reports: This set of online resources from Purdue's Online Writing Lab focuses on a set of civil engineering reports and uses them as the basis for numerous suggestions related to writing technical reports for engineers in industry.
On-Line Handbook: This guide, from the University of Toronto’s Engineering Communication Centre, focuses on report and article writing for engineers, in addition to techniques for oral presentation of engineering results.
IEEE Style Guide: This standard style guide (updated in 2016) is used by most engineering journals and is a necessary reference for those publishing in engineering.
English Solutions to Engineering Research Writing [PDF]: This free ebook, by Adam Turner at Hanyang University in Korea, is jam-packed with writing tips for not just engineers but grad students in all disciplines. Turner has chapters on formal email, how Google and Adobe Acrobat Reader can help you locate discipline-specific grammar and word choice, sentence structure basics, paragraph structure, and the structure and grammar of an (engineering) research article.
Health Sciences
Writing in the Health Sciences: This set of resources from the University of North Carolina contains resources related to copyright, references, and organization, as well as links to additional resources.
Handbook of Biomedical Research Writing: Written for Korean biomedical scientists writing in English, this handbook, by Jocelyn Graf, covers the different parts of a journal article (and grammatical problems common to each part), as well as clinical case reports, correspondence with journal editors, and responses to reviewers.
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