Introduction

The communication of ideas, theories, and experimental results is an important part of scientific work. Vast quantities of scientific literature are pouring out into the world, and if you take up a scientific career of any kind you are almost certain to add to the flood. If you can achieve a good standard of writing, two benefits will accrue – one to yourself when people take note of what you have to say, and the other to the rest of the world who – strange to say – prefer their reading matter to be clear and interesting rather than obscure and dull.

We are going to consider some elementary features of good scientific writing in the present chapter. To make the discussion specific we shall confine it to a paper on some experimental work in physics, but much of what we have to say applies to scientific writing in general.

Title

The title serves to identify the paper. It should be brief – not more than about 10 words. You should bear in mind that the title will ultimately appear in a subject index. The compiler of an index relies heavily on the words in the title in deciding where it should appear. So if there are one or two key words which help to classify the work, try to put them in the title.

Abstract

Every paper should have an abstract of about 100 words or so, giving positive information about its contents.