Transcript Presentation-.pptx

Writing
Biochemistry
Theses
Raymond Critch
The Writing Centre,
Memorial University of Newfoundland
About The Writing Centre
• Locations
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SN 2053; The Commons;
online @ www.mun.ca/writingcentre
Hours – M-F, 9-5 and Sunday , noon-4
Graduate Appointments – our office or [email protected]
Undergraduate Appointments – our office or 864-3168
Drop-in service still available for undergraduates
• Process
o Pre-reading and Session Reading
o Focus on improving your abilities, and thereby your paper, rather than on
the paper alone
o Not an editing service
o Once/Week/Assignment
o Triage – HOCs and LOCs
Biochemistry Theses
• Structure of Biochemistry Dissertations
o Introduction
• What are you researching
• What does one need to know to understand the research
o Background and detail
• Why is this question interesting
o Audience – broad and narrow
• What goes into the writing of an introduction – timing?
o Methodology Chapter(s)
• What materials are used in the experiments
• What is the process
o What would someone attempting to reproduce your results need
to know in order to reproduce the experiment accurately
• How many? – One per experiment? Experimental overlap?
• Timing?
Biochemistry Theses
• Structure of Biochemistry Dissertations
o Results
• What happened? How did the experiment(s) turn out?
• Completeness is important – what worked, what didn’t, what
changed along the way?
o Discussion
• What does it mean?
• Should be some consonance between discussion and introduction –
recall why the experiment was important in the first place
• Timing is Everything
o Write Introduction and Methods/Materials BEFORE doing the experiments.
• Expect Revisions – Revisions are a good thing, not a bad thing
o Write the results as you’re doing the experiments – and revise as the results
come in
o Keep sending drafts to your supervisors, friends, acquaintances, anyone…
Writing for Academics
• Paragraph Structure
o One point per paragraph
• Topic Sentences and the introduction of a section
o Be Boring – give away the ending at the beginning, along with
how you’re going to get there
• Clarity
o Word Choice – ‘academic’ vocabulary
• Using simple words v. utilization of unsophisticated vocabulary
• Passive and Active Voice
• Active voice – subject, verb, object
o ‘I parked the car’
• Passive voice – object as subject, verb
o ‘the car was parked’
• The Clue – ‘was +verb’
Writing for Scientists
• Does anyone actually do science? – the problem
with passive voice
• When do scientists do things? – the problem of verb
tense in scientific writing
o Present Tense – referring to secondary sources
• ‘Jones argues,’ ‘Smith found,’ etc…
o Past Tense – one’s own work
• ‘We found,’ ‘I subjected the test subject to …’
o Future Tense – things not yet done
• ‘We will continue this experiment,’ ‘We hope to discover what will
happen…’
How to Improve
• Start Early
o The priority of language over thought
o Reading is the key to writing
o Practice makes perfect