I entered 2020 thinking of myself as a science writer. I ended the year less sure. While the first sparks of the COVID-19 pandemic ignited at the end of 2019, I was traipsing through a hillside in ...

Stereotypical academic writing is rigid, dry, and mechanical, delivering prose that evokes memories of high school and undergraduate laboratory reports. The hallmark of this stereotype is passive ...

Well aware of the gap between the scientific and nonscientific communities —the “two cultures,” as British Physicist and Author C. P. Snow calls them —politicians, educators, TV producers and ...

Writing in science -- Science writing as story telling -- Making a story sticky -- Story structure -- The opening -- The funnel : connecting O and C -- The challenge -- The action -- The resolution -- ...

The stereotype goes that scientific information is technical, dry, and boring. After all, everyone has dragged themselves through a too-dense manuscript or fought sleep during a slow presentation at ...

Citations in the sciences are author-date, and page numbers are only included for direct quotes. This is not an arbitrary rule—this is because of the emphasis on newness in science, rather than simply ...

Nobel laureate and physicist William D. Phillips writes, similarly, that " [i]n high school, I enjoyed and profited from well-taught science and math classes, but in retrospect, I can see that the ...

ChatGPT might not yet give us sparkling prose. But it can free scientists up to focus on more-stimulating writing tasks, says John Tregoning. Many of us have already been trying ChatGPT. If you’ve ...