Writing Science: How to Write Papers That Get Cited and Proposals That Get Funded

Excellent guide for beginning scientists. It changed the way I write and read scientific articles.

This book improved my science writing and I recommend it to all my graduate students. It's short and easy to read, and full of practical advice.

This is book is "a must have" writing book for research scientists. If you ever wish about how you should develop your attitude to be a true writer, than this book is definitely for you. The success rate of researchers comes from citations of their papers, not merely the amount of published papers. Professor Schimel tells us that reading a research paper should be engaging. Thus, it is the task of the writer to make reader's jobs easier. As a scientist, we should keep in our mind that we are a professional writer, not only engineer, mathematician, or programmer. The role of scientists is to collect data and transform them into understanding. Their role as authors is to present that understanding.Story is an important point. Professor Schimel presents some tips and tricks to build a sticky story: a story that will be remembered because of its simplicity, novelty, and engagement. To make a sticky story is not an easy task. Some stories are interesting because they explore unpredicted behavior of their "characters". Data is the character of a scientific story. There are five factors of a sticky story : Simple (S), Unexpected (U), Concrete (C), Credible (C), Emotional (E), and Stories (S).Personally, I suggest you to read this book as supplementary material for other scientific writing books.Some other books that readers will find useful are :1. From Research to Manuscript: A Guide to Scientific Writing by Michael Jay Katz2. Writing for Computer Science by Justin Zobel3. How to Write a Better Thesis by David Evans, Paul Gruba and Justin Zobel4. Eloquent Science: A Practical Guide to Becoming a Better Writer, Speaker and Scientist by David Schultz

I can't say enough good things about this book. It is easily one of the most useful and valuable books that any scientist or academic could read. Off the top of my head, I can only think of The Craft of Research as comparable.Schimel examines the craft of writing like a molecular biologist, addressing both the component units (sentence, paragraph, section), and like a novelist, discussing the overall arc and purpose of your writing. It is barely 200 pages long, but remarkably comprehensive.It helps that the book draws heavily upon two books that I love: Joseph Williams' book on Style, and the Heath brothers' book Make It Stick. Two outstanding choices.What makes the book so useful is that Schimel doesn't just tell you what to do: he shows you. The worked examples, and the commentary on what makes the example good science writing, is just superb.It also helps that Schimel distinguishes between writing about research that you have already done, and writing about research that you hope to do. So this book is useful for grant writers and report writers.What makes the book so valuable is that Schimel a good deal of time dealing with one of the main challenges for beginning researchers: identifying and articulating exactly what it is you hope to learn from the (proposed) research.Chapter 20: Writing for the Public, where Schimel discusses the "message box", is worth the price of the book alone.Quite simply, this book should be handed out to every student in the natural and social sciences, the day they start school.

Great book! Anyone in science/academia would benefit from reading this and having it as a reference on their bookshelf, from graduate students to faculty.

If you're an experienced writer, a lot of what Schimel says in this book is going to already be quite familiar to you. But the trouble is, a lot of scientists are not particularly well trained as writers, and so this guide might be quite useful to both practicing scientists and graduate (or even undergraduate) students interested in improving their writing.The author's approach is to unpack the idea of good writing in a highly analytical way. Drawing both from examples of good science writing and from quality fiction, the author describes a method of presenting science narratively that I think will serve almost any writer well.There is a danger in this approach, however. Because Schimel has distilled what is fundamentally an art (or at least a craft) into a series of formulae and abstractions, there is a danger of following the advice TOO closely and ending up with a finished piece that has no soul. While a soulless formulaic work might be superior to some of the writing I've read in the sciences, it shouldn't be the goal. Nor does Schimel suggest formulaic writing IS the goal; it's just that his method could produce that if the practitioner isn't careful.Be aware also that this book is intended for scientists to learn about writing, not for writers to learn about how to write science. These are related topics, and the book covers some ground that would be applicable to both groups, but they are not the same things. If you're already a great writer and you're just trying to learn how to apply those skills to science, you'll find this book full of advice with which you already agree, but not much that will serve your particular purpose. This is a book for scientists.But if you are a practicing scientist and you want your papers to have a little more life and actually attract readers' attention rather than cluttering up the journals without ever getting cited, you could do a lot worse than to read this book.