You don’t need to master the English language as a native speaker to write excellent scientific papers. It is more important to make your research easy to grasp. Here, I’ll walk you through the three most essential scientific language hacks.
If you have followed me for a while, you’ll have noticed that I talk a lot about structure when it comes to writing a scientific paper that gets published in your target journal and cited a lot. Structure provides the skeleton of your scientific paper and is, therefore, the most crucial bit. I find the perfect structure is best achieved by using a story-telling approach. While structure is essential, knowing how to use English for scientific writing is important too.
CHARACTERISTICS OF THE SCIENTIFIC LANGUAGE
All too often academics and scientists think that they have to sound fancy to be taken seriously as an expert. The consequence of that is that a major part of the scientific literature is inaccessible even to other researchers in your field. If your research paper is written badly, those who read your paper will have to invest a lot of time trying to understand what you are communicating. Or they may not actually grasp the point your are making (or never read the paper at all). Hence, they won’t cite you — which means that your work won’t contribute to building scientific knowledge.
SCIENTIFIC LANGUAGE: CLEAR, SIMPLE, SHORT
Using scientific language properly when writing a paper means putting your reader first. Instead of sounding like the expert, what is most important when writing a paper is that your reader understands your scientific language easily without having to spend time and effort to decipher your writing. In other words, your scientific language should be clear and non-ambiguous.
There are two more guiding principles when it comes to scientific writing in English: Your writing should also be as short as possible and communicate your findings in the simplest way.
IT’S NOT ABOUT HAVING FLAWLESS ENGLISH FOR SCIENTIFIC WRITING
Once your scientific writing in English is clear, simple and short, having an advanced scientific writing vocabulary or mastering the English language and grammar at a native-speaker-level is not necessary. Or put differently, native English speakers don’t automatically know how to write a scientific paper.
If English is your second (or third, or fourth…) language, think twice before you pay an external editor to correct the language in your scientific paper. It may pay off a lot more important to a) tackle the structure of your writing first, and b) to implement the scientific language tips I’m sharing below.
USING ENGLISH FOR SCIENTIFIC WRITING
Here are three easy guidelines to follow to make your scientific language clear, short and simple. Just implementing these three hacks will make your scientific paper so much easier to read:
- Words to use in scientific writing: verbs instead of nouns
- What tense to use in scientific writing
- Words to avoid in scientific writing: inconsistent terminology
Let me explain.
1) WORDS TO USE IN SCIENTIFIC WRITING: VERBS INSTEAD OF NOUNS
Scientific writing in English that is very noun-heavy is really hard to read. On the contrary, sentences with powerful verbs are much quicker to grasp. Among the nouns that I notice academics use too often in their scientific papers are “agreement”, “disagreement”, “investigation”, “analysis”, “examination”, “comparison”, “increase”, “decrease” and “improvement” etc. I suggest you erase those from your scientific writing vocabulary right now!
If you use the corresponding verbs instead, your sentences will be way less convoluted, and faster to read. Let me show you an example:
- We present an analysis of the catalyst performance. Because we observed a slight improvement in activity, our results are in agreement with the literature.
is better phrased as
- We analysed the catalyst performance. Because the activity improved slightly, our results agree with the literature.
Did you notice how much easier it was to read the second version compared to the first? And that’s not all: The second example contains only two thirds of the words of the first. Thus, using verbs instead of nouns is also a great technique to cut down your word count.
2) WHAT TENSE TO USE IN SCIENTIFIC WRITING
As a graduate student, I kept being confused about what tense to use in scientific writing. I’m not surprised if you are too because so many authors of scientific papers are not using the tenses correctly. When I or our other academic writing coaches review writing for members of our online program, the Researchers’ Writing Academy, we make a note about the tense used almost every time.
I’m not talking about what tense to use in scientific writing to make sure your writing is grammatically correct but rather because the wrong tense can easily confuse a reader.
Generally, if you describe actions that took place in the past, such as the findings of past research, your own experiments and specific observations, the past tense is the correct one.
Here are some examples of sentences that should be written in past tense:
- Janssen et al. observed that….
- We measured the diameter of the nanoparticles using…
- The activity was dependent on… *
* if this is for a specific experiment
So, when should you use the present tense? This tense is reserved for established facts, truths, generalisations and things that your scientific paper covers.
- Platinum is a transition metal commonly used as a catalyst.
- The activity depends on…**
- In this paper, we show that…
* if this is a general trend, and not only the result of a specific experiment
3) WORDS TO AVOID IN SCIENTIFIC WRITING: INCONSISTENT TERMINOLOGY
If you asked me which words to avoid in scientific writing, I’d say: synonyms! I know you may be afraid of repeating yourself risking to make your writing boring, but the truth is: Your reader will get confused if you call the same thing many different things. I promise, they won’t get bored reading your text. They are not reading your paper to get entertained but rather to understand something, so always remember rule #1 about scientific language: Be clear.
A simple intervention to make your scientific writing in English clearer is by defining a term clearly and then using that term consistently throughout your whole manuscript.
I’ll give you an example:
“Signal”, “electron count”, the invented abbreviation “EC”, and “intensity” may be used interchangeably. Instead of using all of these synonyms in different places in your manuscript, decide on one synonym and stick with it!
MASTERING SCIENTIFIC LANGUAGE – CONCLUSION
Repeat after me: Clear, simple, short — that encapsulates everything you need to know about scientific writing in English. If you feel like you’re not effective at communicating clearly and concisely, maybe are getting desk-rejected a lot, I have a free resource for you!
In this free online training, I will introduce you to my step-by-step system to write clear & concise papers for your target journals. Click the button below to watch now or save for later.
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