Technical Writing

In technical writing, the scientist wishes to communicate specialized information or information based upon facts, to the reader.  This type of communication requires clear, precise, unambiguous, unemotional and sometimes nonjudgmental language, whereas non-technical writing like, poetry and fiction, use intuition, feelings and imagination.

According to, “The Science of Scientific Writing”, published in Scientific American(1990), the science writer must write with the reader in mind.  This means that the reader of the technical writing, the person going to use this information, must accurately perceive what the writer had in mind.  In order to help the reader perceive what the writer had in mind a number of things must be considered:

1.                            The reader of a science paper expects to find information placed in

discrete places within the paper.  In a science paper these are the:

Abstract

Introduction:

Hypotheses

Materials and Methods

Results

Conclusions/Discussion

References

Readers of technical papers are therefore not confused because they have learned what each of these sections of a science paper contains.  This placement of materials in known places helps the reader interpret what is written more easily.

2. Readers also have expectations for the structure of prose in a technical

paper.  There is no question that technical papers are hard to read because of a highly specialized technical vocabulary.  The same article mentioned above points out that long, complex sentences are not the problem.

a.       Readers expect a subject to be immediately followed by a verb.

b.      Readers expect each sentence, paragraph or section of the science paper, to have a beginning and ending.

c.       Readers expect the unexciting material to precede the exciting material( the new information), which should be emphasized at the end. This will also provide context for the reader before asking the reader to consider anything new and this keeps the reader’s momentum moving.  In other words, save the best for last.  Gopen and Swann ( Scientific American, 1990) say, “ We cannot succeed in making even a single sentence mean one and only one thing; we can only increase the odds that a large majority of readers will tend to interpret our discourse according to our intentions.”

3.  Concentrate on whether the experiments prove the hypothesis.

4.      As a science writer be sure to make the reader aware of your interpretations by remembering the reader is also making interpretations.