Writing Science

As a scientist, you are a professional writer: your career is built on successful proposals and papers. Two elements are fundamental to writing successfully: structure and language. Our writing is successful when we tell an effective story about nature and how it works. But stories work because they have effective structure that puts the right information in the right place – so how do we structure a strong story? How do we to use different structures for different types of documents? Academics also have acquired a collection of bad, and unnecessary, language habits that weaken communication. We like reading good writing – so how do we write it?