The Craft of Writing
Every section of a scientific paper rests on the same underlying craft. A sharp introduction, a reproducible methods section, and a memorable result all depend on story structure, paragraph architecture, sentence energy, and flow. This page covers that shared foundation, drawn from Joshua Schimel’s Writing Science. It complements scientific writing, which places these skills inside the IMRaD structure, and the section pages that apply them.
A paper is an argument, not a data dump#
A paper tells a story with a shape, and the reliable shape is OCAR.
- Opening establishes the broad context and why the topic matters.
- Challenge narrows to the specific gap, problem, or question.
- Action is what the study does about it.
- Resolution is what you found and what it means.
The mistake most drafts make is dumping data in place of an argument. Four paragraphs of background before the gap appears, results reported in the order you happened to run them, a discussion that trails into limitations. OCAR fixes the order by forcing every part to earn its place in one continuous line of reasoning. The same arc works at every scale: a one-page specific aims, an abstract, a single section, even a paragraph.
The paragraph is the unit of thought#
Give each paragraph one idea, and state that idea in the first sentence. This first sentence is the lead: it tells the reader what the paragraph is about before they read the evidence. A reader who skims only the lead sentences should still recover the paper’s argument.
The test is direct. Read the first sentence of each paragraph in sequence. If those sentences form a coherent summary, the structure is sound. If they read as disconnected facts, the paragraphs are misordered or the leads are not doing their job.
Cram two ideas into one paragraph and the second becomes invisible. Split it. Three to eight sentences per paragraph is a reasonable range, though the count matters less than the rule of one idea each.
Sentence energy#
Strong sentences run subject, verb, object, with the subject and verb close together. Long insertions between them force the reader to hold the opening in mind while hunting for the verb.
Prefer verbs to their noun forms. “We analyzed the samples” carries more energy than “we performed an analysis of the samples.” The noun forms, sometimes called zombie nouns, drain motion from prose.
Put the most important information at the end of the sentence, the stress position. Readers remember what lands last, so end on the point rather than on a qualifier or a citation.
Active voice is the default. “Warming accelerated decomposition” beats “decomposition was observed to be accelerated by warming.” Reserve passive voice for when the actor is unknown or beside the point.
Flow: old information before new#
Flow is what carries a reader from one sentence to the next without a jolt. The device is the given-new contract: start each sentence with information the reader already has, and end it with what is new. Then the new item becomes the given at the start of the following sentence, and the chain pulls the reader forward.
Pre-symptomatic transmission complicates control. This early transmission means that isolating cases at symptom onset misses infections that have already occurred.
“Pre-symptomatic transmission” is new at the end of the first sentence and becomes the given (“This early transmission”) at the start of the second. Break the contract and the reader feels the gap even when every sentence is grammatical.
Sticky ideas#
A result that is not remembered may as well not exist. Concreteness makes ideas stick. Numbers, specific consequences, and plain nouns lodge in memory where abstractions slide off.
Forgettable: the intervention reduced transmission.
Sticky: test-and-isolate cut secondary infections by 40 percent, enough to drive below 1.
The sticky version gives a number and a consequence the reader can hold onto. State the key finding once, plainly, in a form worth repeating.
Cutting#
Shorter is clearer. Most readers absorb a fraction of what you write, so brevity raises the odds they keep the part that matters. Delete throat-clearing and hedging that carries no weight.
- “It is important to note that” adds nothing; cut it.
- “In order to” becomes “to.”
- “Due to the fact that” becomes “because.”
- “It may be possible that X” becomes “X may.”
Run a cut pass with a target of ten to twenty percent. The draft almost always improves.
Before and after#
The weak version below buries its finding, hedges, and leans on zombie nouns.
Weak: It is important to note that an investigation of the transmission dynamics was carried out, and it was found that a substantial proportion of the transmission events may possibly have occurred prior to the onset of symptoms in the index cases.
The rewrite leads with the result, uses an active verb, and lands the number at the stress position.
Strong: More than half of transmission occurred before the index case developed symptoms.
Same content, a third of the words, and the reader remembers it.
Why it matters#
These are not stylistic flourishes laid over finished science. Ordering an argument, leading each paragraph with its claim, and connecting each sentence to the last is how you find the gaps in your own reasoning. Writing this way is a way of thinking, and it is what turns a pile of results into a paper someone will read and cite.