I attended the Neuroscience conference organized by the Society for Neuroscience in November 2011. It was an enlightening experience for me as I was amidst the entire spectrum of groundbreaking neuroscience research. It was fascinating to witness the power of the common cause of sharing scientific work bridge gaps of region and culture. It was during this conference that I truly soaked in the impact of good scientific writing. That written communication is the currency with which the entire research community functions is a truism we are all aware of; but I caught a glimpse of scientific writing as a genre in itself with its own set of rules and idiosyncrasies at the meeting.

As students, formal writing is interlaced into our coursework in the form of term papers, lab reports, examinations or even emails, for that matter. It is also the frequent cause of distress mainly because of the rigidity of the written word; it doesn’t afford the flexibility of the spoken word or an informal writeup. Scientific writing is formal writing taken to the graduate level. Not only does the language not allow a lot of wiggle room, it is vital that it convey the science in its exact sense. It is not an art but a skill that needs to be learnt with painstaking diligence. As with learning any skill, one needs to gradually master the technique unique to scientific writing.

In my experience, I have found the tense and the choice of pronoun to be the key to maintaining the tautness of a scientific writeup. In essence, these factors are important in any style of writing; however, it is a lot more tempting but disastrous to play around with them in a scientific setup. Most scientific literature is written in the third person, in the past tense, which sets the formal tone of the composition. This brings us to another crucial element of writing-the voice. Passive voice is the bane of all scientific writing as it    makes the already stiff narrative dreary. Active voice keeps the narrative fresh and is the sole weapon that can prevent the reader from dozing off midway. Once the voice is taken care of, we need to look at the most important ingredient of our writeup-words. One of the advantages of scientific writing is that it requires very little creativity in terms of word choice. An important caveat is that it also has very low tolerance towards verbose language. It is essential that words are kept to the absolute minimum; anything superfluous takes away from the seriousness of the topic and makes reading a chore. Having said that, I wrap up my article with the hope that some of you will find my insights about scientific writing useful!

Wishing you all a very happy 2012!

Tags: pharmacy, Raghavan, Writing

Aparna Raghavan is a third year PhD student in the Department of Medicinal and Biological Chemistry. She held the chair position of the Social committee of American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists (AAPS) student chapter (2010-2011), and is currently on the student diversity committee of the College. When she is not swamped with graduate research work, she spends time reading, dabbling in creative writing and cooking.
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This entry was posted on Saturday, January 7th, 2012 at 11:10 pm and is filed under Pharmacy Journals.
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