{"id":82,"date":"2011-01-15T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2011-01-15T07:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pim.famnit.upr.si\/wp\/?p=82"},"modified":"2021-11-17T11:21:59","modified_gmt":"2021-11-17T11:21:59","slug":"how-to-write-scientific-text","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pim.famnit.upr.si\/wp\/?p=82","title":{"rendered":"How to write scientific text?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Ever wondered what makes a good scientific text readable? Not that I&#8217;m good at it (and this blog is probably full of typos and bad structured sentences &#8211; it sure isn&#8217;t scientific writing :)) but here are some things I learned so far:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Clear, understandable, not to long and not to short sentences that don&#8217;t confuse (loose) the reader<\/li>\n<li>Important things stressed out at the beginning of each sentence and not at the end (where reader gets lost)<\/li>\n<li>Not to long and not to short paragraphs<\/li>\n<li>First sentence of a paragraph is an introduction to what the paragraph is about (scanning first sentence of each paragraph of a paper should give a reader the idea of the whole paper&#8217;s structure and content)<\/li>\n<li>No citations in the abstract \ud83d\ude42<\/li>\n<li>Abstract is the key part to make readers read further and it should explain what the paper is about (don&#8217;t make the abstract an introduction)<\/li>\n<li>Abstract has to be one paragraph<\/li>\n<li>Provide and overview throughout the paper and guide the reader<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>This is certainly not the whole list but just important points to consider when writing a scientific text. And practicing is what makes us better :). It&#8217;s like playing an instrument: no practice, no success.<\/p>\n<p>To read more on the issue, the following links should be the good start with examples:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.lancs.ac.uk\/celt\/sldc\/materials\/science\/science.htm\">Writing for Science and Technology Student, Lancaster University, Effective Learning, CELT<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.lancs.ac.uk\/celt\/sldc\/materials\/science\/science.htm\"><\/a><a href=\"http:\/\/www.americanscientist.org\/issues\/id.877,y.0,no.,content.true,page.2,css.print\/issue.aspx\">The science of Scientific Writing, American Scientist<br \/><\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www-mech.eng.cam.ac.uk\/mmd\/ashby-paper-V6.pdf\">How to Write a Paper, Mike Ashby Engineering Department, University of Cambridge, Cambridge 6rd Edition, April 2005 [PDF]&nbsp;<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p style=\"margin: 0px; text-indent: 0px;\">I have recently read a nicely written paper which I not only recommend for the sake of language: <\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"margin: 0px; text-indent: 0px;\"><em>Alan Dix (2010). <a href=\"http:\/\/www.comp.lancs.ac.uk\/~dixa\/papers\/IwC-LongFsch-HCI-2010\/\">Human-Computer Interaction: a stable discipline, a nascent science, and the growth of the long tail.<\/a> Interacting with Computers, 22(1) pp. 13-27.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p style=\"margin: 0px; text-indent: 0px;\"><!--EndFragment--><\/p>\n<p>I had a supervisor once who&#8217;s papers were really nice to read, too. Even my wife has read a few of them just because his writing was fluent (she actually doesn&#8217;t care about CS or HCI). An example abstract from one of his papers:<\/p>\n<p style=\"background-color: #e1e1e1;\"><em>User Interface Management Systems have significantly reduced the effort<br \/>\nrequired to build a user interface. However, current systems assume a<br \/>\nset of standard &quot;widgets&quot; and make no provisions for defining new ones.<br \/>\nThis forces user interface designers to either do without or laboriously<br \/>\n build new widgets with code. The Interface Object Graph is presented as<br \/>\n a method for specifying and communicating the design of interaction<br \/>\nobjects or widgets. Two sample specifications are presented, one for a<br \/>\nsecure switch and the other for a two dimensional graphical browser.&nbsp; <\/em><\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.cs.umd.edu\/hcil\/members\/dcarr\/\">David Carr <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Ever wondered what makes a good scientific text readable? Not that I&#8217;m good at it (and this blog is probably full of typos and bad structured sentences &#8211; it sure isn&#8217;t scientific writing :)) but here are some things I learned so far: Clear, understandable, not to long and not to short sentences that don&#8217;t&#46;&#46;&#46;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-82","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pim.famnit.upr.si\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pim.famnit.upr.si\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pim.famnit.upr.si\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pim.famnit.upr.si\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pim.famnit.upr.si\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=82"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pim.famnit.upr.si\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":832,"href":"https:\/\/pim.famnit.upr.si\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/82\/revisions\/832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pim.famnit.upr.si\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=82"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pim.famnit.upr.si\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=82"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pim.famnit.upr.si\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=82"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}