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Scientific Writing Skills

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... to the man (or woman) who convinces the world, not to the man (or woman) to whom ... avoiding frustration, finding your focus, productive writing and ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: Scientific Writing Skills


1
Scientific Writing Skills
  • Presented by
  • Prof. Leon de Stadler
  • US Writing Centre

2
  • But in science the credit goes to the man (or
    woman) who convinces the world, not to the man
    (or woman) to whom the idea first occurs
  • Sir Francis Darwin

3
Topics for discussion
  • The writing task and the writing process
  • What makes it scientific?
  • Scientific writing Structured writing
  • Kinds of structure

4
Topics for discussion
  • Problem statements and hypotheses
  • Coherence
  • Scientific style
  • The US Writing Centre

5
Task vs. process
  • How do you go about the writing task?
  • Why the process is important
  • It is about organisation, avoiding frustration,
    finding your focus, productive writing and
  • a final product to be proud of

6
Steps in the process
  • Invention Coming up with a topic and a clear
    focus on the topic
  • Collecting the data
  • Organising the document the outline
  • Drafting - writing, writing and writing again
    ...

7
Steps in the process
  • Revising Focusing on higher-order concerns
  • Proofreading Focusing on the lower-order
    concerns

8
Scientific Writing
  • is as much about science as it is about writing
    ...
  • but for some reason we tend to forget about the
    latter
  • Thats why our goal should be to change the
    mindset about writing

9
Scientific?
  • Contributing to the world of knowledge
  • Originality
  • Critical thinking and insight
  • A clear focus but on what?

10
Scientific?
  • Insights, theories, assumptions, jargon, etc. of
    the field
  • No unnecessary baggage
  • Relevant ...
  • to the defense of a view point

11
Scientific?
  • Coherent
  • Structured
  • Scientific style
  • No mistakes

12
Scientific Structured
  • Content structure
  • External structure

13
Content structure
  • Content organisation
  • Content hierarchy
  • The role of a good introduction
  • A clear topic
  • A well-focused problem statement
  • Well-defined hypotheses
  • Clear aims and objectives

14
Writing an introduction
  • An important structuring mechanism
  • Anouncing the topic
  • Motivation to undertake the study
  • Most important findings in the published
    literature
  • Research problem and hypotheses
  • Brief review of following chapters

15
Problem statement
  • Specific
  • Highly focused, clear
  • As concrete as possible
  • Preferably one problem statement may be broken
    up into a number of subproblems

16
Problem statement
  • Discussion of the problem statement in the
    example text
  • Can you find a single sentence denoting the
    problem statement?
  • Where exactly is the focal element in the
    section?
  • Another example on the overhead ...

17
Hypothesis
  • The answer to your problem statement
  • Should be refutable
  • Should not be negative

18
Other components
  • Theoretical framework
  • Literature review
  • Research designProblem statement(s),
    hypotheses,pilot study, sample taking, sample
    size, measuring instruments, statistical
    techniques, etc.

19
Other components
  • Presentation of findings
  • Discussion of findings
  • Conclusions

20
External structure
  • The so-called entry structures for the reader
  • Divisions into chapters, sections and paragraphs
  • The importance of headings

21
Coherence
  • Logical build-up of ideas
  • Paragraph structure
  • Coherence relationships
  • Markers of coherence
  • Problems with coherence

22
Paragraph structure
  • A unit of thought
  • One (sub)theme described in the theme sentence
  • Supported by other sentences

23
Paragraph problems
  • Paragraphs that do not link properly
  • Too long more than one theme
  • Too short one theme dealt with in more than one
    paragraph

24
Coherence
  • Between paragraphs and between sentences
  • Logical flow of thought
  • One thought following from or building upon
    another conceptual links relevance
  • Different kinds of relationships

25
Markers of coherence
  • Words and frases that signal the existence of a
    coherence relationship
  • Pronouns, conjunctions, repeated thematic
    elements, related words, etc.
  • Examples in the example text

26
Scientific style
  • Formality creating distance between writer and
    reader
  • Goal objectivity
  • But style and formulation should not make the
    reading task impossible
  • In this section a few problems related to style
    and formulation

27
Style Problems
  • Passive voice
  • Referring to the writer?
  • Difficult sentences
  • Short sentences
  • Nominalisations
  • Dangling constructions

28
Style Problems
  • Unnecessary qualifiers
  • Pronouns and their antecedents

29
Visit the US Writing Centre!
  • http//www.sun.ac.za/sagus/USWritingCentre.htm

30
  • Thank you for your attention!

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