General Biology: John B. Coleman Library Resources and Services (Dr. Brown) : Writing in the Biological Sciences: Full Text Journal Articles

Scientific writing, while an indispensable step of the scientific process, is often overlooked in undergraduate courses in favor of maximizing class time devoted to scientific concepts. However, the ability to effectively communicate research findings is crucial for success in the biological sciences. Graduate students are encouraged to publish early and often, and professional scientists are generally evaluated by the quantity of articles published and the number of citations those articles receive. It is therefore important that undergraduate students receive a solid foundation in scientific writing early in their academic careers. In order to increase the emphasis on effective writing in the classroom, we assembled a succinct step-by-step guide to scientific writing that can be directly disseminated to undergraduates enrolled in biological science courses. The guide breaks down the scientific writing process into easily digestible pieces, providing concrete examples that students can refer to when preparing a scientific manuscript or laboratory report. By increasing undergraduate exposure to the scientific writing process, we hope to better prepare undergraduates for graduate school and productive careers in the biological sciences

eaching scientific writing in biology classes is challenging for both teachers and students. This article offers and reviews several useful 'toolkit' items that instructors of science writing can use to improve college student success. The tools in this kit are both conceptual and practical, and include: (1) Understanding the role of student metacognition, cognitive instruction, and strategic teaching, (2) Recognition of different student writing levels, (3) Applying the writing process, (4) Demonstrational classroom revision and editing, (5) Student-teacher sentence editing, (6) Student peer editing and guided student editing, (7) Student copy-editing, (8) Reflective writing, (9) Addressing plagiarism, paraphrasing, and proper in-text citations and referencing, and (10) Using external, on campus and online resources. Additionally, we discuss the new challenges of teaching scientific writing online versus face-to-face. The discussions, approaches, and exercises presented in this paper empower teachers in assisting students in their development of a personal writing style, while simultaneously building student confidence. The tools we present augment our previous presentation of the student writing toolkit, and can improve and enhance the teaching of scientific writing to undergraduate students.

Teaching scientific writing in biology classes is challenging for both students and instructors. This article offers and reviews several useful "toolkit" items that improve student writing. These include sentence and paper-length templates, funnelling and compartmentalisation, and preparing compendiums of corrections. In addition, students benefit from reviewing scientific figures and learning about the verbs used in scientific papers. The approaches and exercises presented in this paper empower students in their development of a personal writing style. Often, however, the best tools are those that students develop with each other, a method of tool building addressed in this article.