Craft of Scientific Writing

The Craft of Scientific Writing is designed to help scientists and engineers--both professionals already active in the disciplines as well as students preparing to enter the professions--write about their work clearly and effectively.§The author, who is both a writer and an applied physicist, approaches the subject in a fresh way. Using scores of examples from a wide variety of authors and disciplines (including such well-known figures as Einstein, Bohr, and Freud), the book demonstrates the difference between strong scientific writing and weak scientific writing. In essence, this book shows you how to bring your ideas across to your intended audience. In addition, it contains advice on how to start writing, and how to revise your drafts. §Written for use as a text in courses on scientific writing, the book includes many useful suggestions about approaching a wide variety of writing tasks--from laboratory reports to grant proposals, from internal communications to press releases--as well as a concise guide to style and usage appropriate for scientific writing. The book will also be useful for self-study and it will be an important reference for all scientists and engineers who need to write about their work.§Topics covered include:§- Deciding Where to Begin§- Structure: Organizing Your Documents; Providing Depth, Transitions, and Emphasis§- Language: Being Precise, Clear, and Concise; Being Forthright, Familiar, and Fluid§- Illustration: Making the Right Choices; Creating the Best Designs §- Handling Special Situations§- Actually Sitting Down to Write: Drafting; Revising; FinishingThe Craft of Scientific Writing is designed to help scientists and engineers- both professionals already active in the disciplines as well as students preparing to enter the professions- write about their work clearly and effectively. Written for use as a text in courses on scientific writing, the book includes many useful suggestions about approaching a wide variety of writing tasks from laboratory reports to grant proposals and from internal communications to press releases, as well as a concise guide to style and usage appropriate for scientific writing. The book will also be useful for self-study and it will be an important reference for all scientists and engineers who need to write about their work. §With this new and updated edition, while most technical writing texts have gotten larger and larger over the years, this one is slimming down, to provide busy readers with the essence of what distinguishes the style of the best scientific documents. With this new edition, readers will learn not just how to organize information, but how to emphasize the key details of that information. Also, readers will not just learn how to cast their ideas into precise and clear sentences, but how to connect these sentences in an energetic fashion. In regard to the section on language, the new edition goes into more depth about how to make connections between ideas- an important issue that few technical writing texts address. Second, the new edition also explores more deeply about how to design illustrations so that they are more persuasive. Third, the new edition does a better job of explaining the purposes of different sections to a journal paper, such as literature review, methods, results, etc.The Craft of Scientific Writing uses scores of examples to show the differences between scientific writing that informs and persuades and scientific writing that does not. Focusing on technical papers, dissertations, and reports, this text shows engineers, scientists, and technical professionals the five keys of style that distinguish the best scientific documents: (1) having the details presented in a methodical fashion, (2) having the important details emphasized, (3) having ideas cast into clear and precise sentences, (4) having clear connections between those ideas, and (5) having illustrations that persuade.§Michael Alley is also the author of The Craft of Scientific Presentations (Springer 2003) and The Craft of Editing (Springer 2000).