UTModPhy: References: Writing

Summary of writing resources

	The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White. (read it online / buy it).
	On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction, by William Knowlton Zinsser. (buy it).
	"Politics and the English Language" from A Collection of Essays by George Orwell. (read it online /buy it).
	"Cargo Cult Science," in Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman!, by R.P. Feynman (read it online / buy it).
	The Chicago Manual of Style (14th ed.) (University of Chicago Press).

Scientific Writing:

	Advice on Technical Writing from Dr. Bengtson.
	Lynch 1994 -- Restructuring Scientific Papers
	Manuscript presentation
	Researching and Writing in the Sciences and Technology, by Christine Hult (Allyn and Bacon). (buy it)
	AIP Style Manual (American Institute of Physics). (buy it)

Writing References:

	The Merriam-Webster dictionary and thesaurus.
	Citing Online References (Columbia Online Style Guide)
	Undergraduate Writing Center
	Writing with Gender-Fair Language
	The Rensselaer Writing Center (Handouts)
	Purdue Online Writing Lab (Handouts)

Sample Articles:

	Relativity
	Superconductivity New York Times Article
	Solar Spectra NYT Article
	A Close Look at the Therapuetic Touch

Writing Lucid Prose

The universally accepted guide to good english prose is The Elements of Style by William Strunk. (Unfortunately, this hyperlink does not have the last chapter -- on style -- by E.B. White. You should just buy the real thing).

	The habitual use of the active voice, however, makes for forcible writing. This is true not only in narrative principally concerned with action, but in writing of any kind. Many a tame sentence of description or exposition can be made lively and emphatic by substituting a transitive in the active voice for some such perfunctory expression as there is, or could be heard. (Strunk, EoS, III.1)
	Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell. (Strunk, EoS, III.3)

Another popular, and more detailed, reference is On Writing Well: The Classic Guide to Writing Nonfiction, by William Knowlton Zinsser.

Look for the clutter in your writing and prune it ruthlessly. Be grateful for everything you can throw away. Re-examine each sentence that you put on paper. Is every word doing new work? Can any thought be expressed with more economy? Is anything pompous or pretentious or faddish? Are you hanging on to something useless just because you think it's beautiful?

Simplify, simplify.

(Zinsser, On Writing Well, 18)

For a shorter, more polemical essay, read "Politics and the English Language," contained in A Collection of Essays by George Orwell. (hypertext / printable).

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. When you think of a concrete object, you think wordlessly, and then, if you want to describe the thing you have been visualizing you probably hunt about until you find the exact words that seem to fit it. When you think of something abstract you are more inclined to use words from the start, and unless you make a conscious effort to prevent it, the existing dialect will come rushing in and do the job for you, at the expense of blurring or even changing your meaning. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one's meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. (Orwell, P&EL)

(Also read the essay Microspeak by James Gleick; these dangers persist.)

Richard Feynman's Cargo Cult Science leture, like almost everything else he wrote, is a brilliant, funny presentation on the basis for scientific truth and the need for active honesty -- the need to seek out and highlight potential in your scientific methods.

But this long history of learning how to not fool ourselves -- of having utter scientific integrity -- is, I'm sorry to say, something that we haven't specifically included in any particular course that I know of. We just hope you've caught on by osmosis.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool. So you have to be very careful about that. After you've not fooled yourself, it's easy not to fool other scientists. You just have to be honest in a conventional way after that.

Writing scientific reports.

The three books by Edward Tufte on information design, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, Envisioning Information, and Visual Explanations are recognized classics and fun to read. The books discuss "information design:" graphical design principles that will help you take megabytes of twenty dimensional data and present it in a way that is clear, compelling, and enforces comparisons. They contain prescriptive, constructive advice and well-chosen examples. Envisioning Information is a good one to start with. Information Architects by R. S. Wurman is "a splendid collection of some of the best examples of how information can be communicated clearly using visual elements" (from its review).

The website Writing Guidelines for Engineering and Science Students covers the full range of technical papers, from memos to formal reports.

Other references on scientific writing include

	Advice on Technical Writing from Dr. Bengtson.
	Lynch 1994 -- Restructuring Scientific Papers
	Manuscript presentation
	Researching and Writing in the Sciences and Technology, by Christine Hult (Allyn and Bacon).
	AIP Style Manual (American Institute of Physics).

Sample reports

A sample electron diffraction report is available in the lab. (It is not on the web). We strongly encourage that you read through it.

Marcos Huerta and Keith Cohn (Spring 98) developed the Relativity experiment. In five weeks, they put together the experiment, learned LabView, wrote the LabView code, wrote a lab report, and constructed the web page. Wow.

Art Blair's (Fall 1997) Superconductivity New York Times Article has some clever analogies and many helpful graphics. His article shows a good balance between theory and applications.

Geoff Matthews' (Spring 98) Solar Spectra NYT Article manages to make the solar spectrum experiment -- a topic our grandparents had well in hand -- not only newsworthy but hilarious. Especially note the last paragraph, which clearly lays out where the support for scientific results arise.

One of the keynote speakers at the 1998 IgNobel Prizes was 11-year old Emily Rosa, co-author of "A Close Look at Therapeutic Touch" (JAMA 4/1/98; abstract /full text). Note how scrupulous the authors are to point out potential flaws (corrected and uncorrected) in their experimental method, and also the level of statistical analysis they employ.