Our lecture today is on scientific writing and what are we going to talk about? The first

point is what is scientific writing? Then the second point is what are explicit rules

of scientific writing in general but also like as much as I could for medical engineering at FAU

because that's where this lecture is allocated. Then what are implicit rules of scientific writing

and what are tools for scientific writing that's getting practical? Let's start with

what is scientific writing? I want to start off with the suggestion that scientific writing is

an art and not a science which may come as a surprise. Now the reason why I'm saying that

is that often what you find is that people who first start to do scientific writing have to

have the notion that because it is part of the scientific process, it is part of research,

you have to write down every little bit of information that you have generated,

you have gathered in some way or another and have to follow mapped out rules that are mapped out

somewhere but you don't really know where. Trying to do that is I like to compare to having

chaotic number of chaotic and large gathering of building blocks and if you were

thinking of each building block as one piece of information that you're gathering during your

research then trying to present it all would be like just throwing these pieces out and they

wouldn't have any form, any meaning for viewers or readers. But instead what you're supposed to do

in scientific writing is to take these individual pieces of information and build something with a

clear structure and meaning to it and that also involves leaving out a lot of information.

So another way to answer the question of what is scientific writing is try to map it to

different dimensions because scientific writing is varied. You can look at it as

being mapped down to two dimensions, there are certainly more that you could look at

but for this lecture we're just focusing on two. One would be disciplines and another would be

forms. Looking at forms there are lots of different forms of scientific writing

including journal articles, monographs that would be books written by academics, thesis,

all of you know that, there's also science journalism and there are even science news on

Twitter. For example here is a tweet by the journal Science and as they are writing about science

it can be categorized under scientific writing but it's not necessarily something that would come to

mind when you're thinking about scientific writing is it. Now it also makes sense to look at scientific

writing along different disciplines because each discipline has their own idiosyncrasies

on how to write and it can be quite different. So I've worked in and with quite distinct

disciplines from psychology to mathematics to biology and now in human machine interaction

and there are big differences in how people would for example present themselves and their work

in these different disciplines. Now in the rest of this section on what is scientific writing

we will focus on a few particular types of scientific writing that I deem to be

most relevant for your purposes and these are the report and the scientific report has the goal to

document research then the second one is thesis writing that is for example a master's thesis

that's obviously relevant to you because I think both of you and I have been in the same field

I think both of you and many of the people who may be watching this will be writing a master's

thesis still and the third one is scientific articles for example journal papers and other

articles that are published. Okay so starting with the goal of documentation when you want to

present something in research an appropriate form for doing that is a scientific report

and there are many different types of reports. One would be a laboratory report that is essentially

writing something down in your notebook. Then there are more finished reports for example

interim and final progress reports of students. Also project proposals are considered to be

reports that's more of a future planning of research that you intend to do. Also falling

into that are grant applications and there you also are reporting in detail what you intend to

do and how much money you need to do. You need to have to do that. Also public relation documents

can fall under reports and descriptions and manuals which are relevant for creating products like when

you're working maybe in the future for a company. Okay in addition to having a specific purpose

the report also has a specific audience or recipient and that makes a big difference