Scientific Writing Skills

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Scientific Writing Skills

• Presented by
• Prof. Leon de Stadler
• US Writing Centre

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• 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

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Topics for discussion

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

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Topics for discussion

• Problem statements and hypotheses
• Coherence
• Scientific style
• The US Writing Centre

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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

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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
  ...

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Steps in the process

• Revising Focusing on higher-order concerns
• Proofreading Focusing on the lower-order
  concerns

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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

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Scientific?

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

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Scientific?

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

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Scientific?

• Coherent
• Structured
• Scientific style
• No mistakes

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Scientific Structured

• Content structure
• External structure

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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

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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

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Problem statement

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

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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 ...

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Hypothesis

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

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Other components

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

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Other components

• Presentation of findings
• Discussion of findings
• Conclusions

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External structure

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

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Coherence

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

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Paragraph structure

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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Style Problems

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

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Style Problems

• Unnecessary qualifiers
• Pronouns and their antecedents

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Visit the US Writing Centre!

• http//www.sun.ac.za/sagus/USWritingCentre.htm

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• Thank you for your attention!

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