Writing Analytically, 6th Edition - Rosenwasser, David & Stephen, Jill.original_ [208]
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 that the experiment is meant to solve.
It is not until the discussion section that the science writer analyzes the data. The discussion section is not a summary; rather, the writer makes qualified claims and backs them up with evidence. The discussion section completes the frame set up by the introduction by arguing for the significance of the study within its scientific context. A discussion section concludes by looking backwards to summarize implications, then looking forward to articulate what this particular study means for the whole field.
The conclusion explains how questions have been answered and how knowledge in the field might be changed because of the new information.
Word choice in scientific papers—especially the choice of verbs—is important. Scientific writing never “proves,” for example. It “implies” and “indicates.” The science writer chooses verbs to make carefully qualified claims based on an accumulation of evidence.
Scientific writing is corporate, by which I mean that scientific writers speak to and about the community of other science writers. To name a particular scientist