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The Common Format of Academic Writing

Begin with some kind of problem or question or uncertainty. Say why the new study might matter, why it needs doing. Offer a theory to be tested (working thesis/hypothesis).

Test the adequacy of the theory by conducting some kind of experimental procedure or other way of analyzing evidence.

Report resulting data—what was revealed by the experiment or other analytical method such as close reading of textual evidence or statistical analysis.

Interpret the results and draw conclusions about their significance. How might the results change current thinking and/or open the way to new questions and further study?

If you are just learning to write and think in an academic discipline, you cannot be expected to offer in the opening paragraph the state of knowledge in the field on a particular question. Nor can you be expected to arrive at something that will alter thinking in a discipline—although sometimes this does in fact happen. Nevertheless, college writers and their teachers across the curriculum write with similar goals: ask and answer a new question, offer alternatives to existing ideas or evidence, or provide a new perspective or better evidence on something already known.

Writing in the Sciences: A Biochemistry Professor Speaks

The following Voice from Across the Curriculum is taken from a presentation that biochemistry professor Keri Colabroy delivered to a group of undergraduate writing tutors at our college. The talk aimed at enabling the tutors, many of whom are not science majors, to work more confidently with writing that science students bring to the college’s Writing Center. We are grateful to Professor Colabroy for making her material available to us and to the tutors we train. You will find more of this material in the next chapter, Introductions and Conclusions Across the Curriculum.

Voices from Across the Curriculum

The lab report as taught in college science courses teaches students to mimic the process of thinking required to write a scientific paper. The governing question of the lab report is, “To what extent is my data consistent with what I was supposed to get?” Like most scientific writing, the lab report has four parts (five if you include the abstract):

The Parts of Lab Reports and Scientific Papers

Abstract

The short synoptic version of essentially the entire paper: What you did, what you found and how you did it

Introduction/Purpose/Objective

What you are trying to accomplish and why it is important

Methods/Experimental Procedures

The details of how you performed the experiments

Results/Data

Reporting of the data without commentary, often done with tables, graphs and figures rather than text Primarily summative and descriptive, like a Notice and Focus exercise without the implications (See Writing Analytically, Chapter 2)

Discussion/Conclusions

This is where the analysis happens. Cite the data, then make qualified, evidence-based claims from the data;draw implications.

In the written accounts of scientific experiments, some information is repeated across sections. This repetition is deliberate. No scientist reads a paper in order, and so every section has to stand by itself.

In scientific papers, introductions serve two purposes:

(1) to orient your readers to the scientific context of your work while showing them the inherent need for new (your) information to solve an uncertainty or problem, something you or the community doesn’t quite understand (in Writing Analytically, the prompts “interesting, significant or strange” focus writers on problems and areas of uncertainty); and

(2) to state succinctly what the paper/study has accomplished and what that means for the big picture you outlined in point #1.

The introduction of a scientific paper is full of references to primary literature (other scientific papers). In most undergraduate science courses, students are not asked to write the introduction section. Instead, the professor provides a paraphrase of the question/problem