---
title: On Scientific Writing
date: '2008-05-02'
slug: on-scientific-writing
---

I have forgotten where I found the article [The Science of Scientific Writing](http://www.amstat.org/publications/jcgs/sci.pdf), but I do believe there are some useful guidelines in it:

> If the reader is to grasp what the writer means, the writer must understand what the reader needs.

> Information is interpreted more easily and more uniformly if it is placed where most readers expect to find it.

> Beginning with the exciting material and ending with a lack of luster often leaves us disappointed and destroys our sense of momentum.

> 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.

> The information that begins a sentence establishes for the reader a perspective for viewing the sentence as a unit.

> In our experience, the misplacement of old and new information turns out to be he No. 1 problem in American professional writing today.

> Put in the topic position the old information that links backward; put in the stress position the new information you want the reader to emphasize.

> As critical scientific readers, we would like to concentrate our energy on whether the experiments prove the hypotheses.

> It may seem obvious that a scientific document is incomplete without the interpretation of the writer; it may not be so obvious that the document cannot "exist" without the interpretation of each reader.

And here is another paper [How to write consistently boring scientific literature](http://iros2008.inria.fr/Templates/boring_paper.pdf) which is much more interesting (actually ironic!) and worth reading.

