Scientific Writing

So far, college students are still confused in subject scientific writing. In fact, they often experience such as difficulties to write what to write in any scientific writing products, like Research Proposal, Skripsi (Final Project), Academic Paper, Synthesis etc. To help them reduce the obstacles in writing scientifically, here I give some tips.

Building Writers from Readers
    ____________________________________________________________________

We are all readers before being writers. We read far more than we write. As scientists, we read far more than the average reader; and what we read is far more complicated. Is it possible to become a better writer by building on our reading skills?  A priori, it does not seem possible. Reading is more of an experience. If the writing is clear, concise, interesting, fluid, and organised, we enjoy the experience of discovering the information relevant to our needs. If the experience is not pleasant, rarely do we blame the writer, and rarely do we search for the cause of this unpleasantness, blaming instead our short patience or our lack of knowledge; after all, If what we read is not clear to us, it must be because we fail to understand.The failure is ours, not the writer's. Twisted logic. If restaurant food is making you sick, what is needed: a better immune system or a better managed restaurant?

Readers have rights: the rights to clear, concise, interesting, fluid and organised writing. To defend our rights, we need to identify the causes leading to a poor reading experience, and determine with fairness where the responsibility lies, with the reader or with the writer. Most times, it lies with the writer. Therefore, understanding whatever makes us fail as readers is a great learning experience for the wanna be "reader friendly" writer. The purpose of the book and of this website is to help scientist writers understand how they create reading accidents where their readers mentally trip on acronyms, lose themselves in a labyrinth of disjointed ideas, get sucked into the quick sand of extra long sentences from which they will only be able to extract themselves after two of three successive readings. Such reading accidents are predictable, and they are sign-posted in the book "Scientific Writing, a reader and writer's guide". They are also discussed in some of the pages found in the bonus section.

Learning by example is great, as long as the examples are good and there are enough of them for us to detect patterns. Novice writers are often thrown into writing at the deep end of the writer's pool with recommendations such as "Take my paper as an example, and do the same". Unfortunately, good examples are rare, and not identified as good examples. Furthermore, good examples all started as bad examples. As Marc Raibert, former MIT Professor, once wrote, "Good writing is bad writing that was rewritten". And the usual submitted paper has rarely been rewritten enough times to qualify as a good example; pressure to meet the publication deadlines, lack of time for writing the paper, and other extremely good reasons militate against that. 

Writers are unable to see what in their writing make readers stumble. They find what they write to be extremely clear. Indeed, they fail to understand why others do not find it clear. This is so because it is extremely difficult to move seamlessly from writer to reader without giving a face to the reader, a face different from one's own face. Writers occasionally transmute into readers by putting their writing aside for a week and returning to it with a fresh look. They then have to rely on the written archive to reconstruct their original thoughts - a lossy process. While converting thoughts into words, much gets lost in translation!  Because the reader is the one who has to reconstruct the writer' s thoughts, writers need the help of their readers to identify what in their translation process failed to work smoothly.  The Scientific Writing Skills Seminar provide a reader-centred perspective on writing. Once informed, it is so much easier to identify the stumbling blocks in your own writing. The purpose of this site and the book it promotes "Scientific Writing 2.0: a Reader and Writer's guide" is to help you identify these.