Scientific Writing: Easy When You Know How

by Jennifer Peat, Elizabeth Elliott, Louise Baur

This comprehensive and practical book covers the basics of grammar as well as the broad brush issues such as writing a grant application and selling to your potential audience. The clear explanations are expanded and lightened with helpful examples and telling quotes from the giants of good writing. These experienced writers and teachers make scientific writing enjoyable.

Genres: Writing

308 pages, Paperback

First published March 7, 2002

Reviews

[Audiaa · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars
This book is heavily focused on writing clinical research including clinical research examples, with very little information specific to general research articles. Sections of the book focus on using the proper statistics (for clinical studies) data table design, and data organization, but had little to no information about generating other types of figures or writing non-clinical research articles.

This book also includes useful information about submitting your article, writing and responding to peer review, and having an article rejected. These sections were really more about getting published than actually writing. The short section on writing a post graduate dissertation did not include enough information to really be useful. Also, this is not a good recourse for specifics about grant writing.

The final sections of the book include information about actual writing, which didn't seem completely specific to scientific writing, but was all together useful. There are chapters on sentence structure, word choice, grammar, and punctuation. Each of these chapters contain numerous examples where example sentences are made more clear though the topic discussed in the chapter. Of course a lot of writing style even scientific writing is personal preference, so there are no hard and fast rules, but these sections give some good general advice and discuss many common word choice and grammar mistakes.

Overall, I found a lot of good suggestions and advice in this book, but it was also very dense and a little boring. The title and description suggested that the book would be about general scientific writing (many biomedical studies are not clinical trials or clinical studies), but the emphasis on clinical research left out important topics that would be useful to scientists writing other types of research papers.

[Nishelle D’souza · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book really motivated me to get along with the writing process and has some very useful tips