Before you begin reading this article and writing your own paper, make sure you understood all instructions and recommendations provided by your instructor. Professors usually specify the precise formats, procedures, and rules that they wish employed for scientific papers, and your professors’ instructions will always take precedence over the following suggestions.
- Use headers. Typically, science papers contain certain section headers. Basic sections for reports that contain the results of an experiment or study are: abstract, introduction, method, results, discussion, and conclusion. For other kinds of papers (e.g. response on question or prompt), divide the paper sections appropriately and give headers.
- Be concise. Writing a science research paper should be precise and briefer than other types of papers. Try not to use flowing and poetic phrases. Leave that for the literature club. To write an engaging science paper, learn how to use interesting factual statements and to weave them into a logical argument.
- Be more descriptive. The main goal of a scientific paper is to present your experiment or project. To make your paper more realistic, describe the process in details, using cause and effect relationships.
- Be clear in presenting the purpose of your experiment. If you are writing a report on a conducted experiment, present your research questions or hypotheses in a clearly stated manner. You should also be prepared to explain to your instructor how your research questions or hypotheses were developed.
- Avoid using absolute statements. Take into consideration that scientific writing should not contain statements like “never” and “always.” Support all your claims with evidence as only few conditions or results may be absolute.
- Avoid using contractions. Remember, contractions cannot be used in formal writing. You should always consider scientific writing to be formal.
- Do not use slang. Control your language. It is very simple to pick up slang terms in today’s Internet society. However, avoid using informal language in your scientific papers. This may be a major challenge for you. You can seek assistance in understanding what is meant by formal language by visiting some self-help Internet sites.
- Use the correct tense. A scientific paper should be written in a past tense if you are reporting about an experiment you have already conducted. If you are proposing an experiment, then you would write in future tense when discussing what you plan to do, how you plan to do it, and why.
- Use the active voice in writing. Formal papers sound better when you use an active voice.
- Avoid confusing terms. If you want to use terms from a book or scientific article, make sure you understand their meaning in context.