The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure poor reasoning, and inhibit clarity. Calvin, to Hobbes, in “Calvin and Hobbes” Scientific writing — and the work before you start to write — is still one of my favorite subjects. I’m currently looking for ways to make this my profession (among a couple of other avenues), mostly because I think there is a lot of unrealized potential when it comes to scientific writing. Many writing courses at the university seem to ignore technological developments. You could have a quill and a piece of parchment and still apply most of the tips and recommendations. Outliners to handle the complexity of the text, or modern writing software like Scrivener to easily compose the text, … they usually do not make an appearance. Even worse, some seem to be informed more by classical fiction writing, which includes ideas like “free writing” to break a writers block. But scientific writing is not fiction writing, and even fiction writing can benefit from a lot of organization and structure. I strongly agree with Alley‘s view that scientific writing is a craft (inspiration is not needed!), and with Hayton’s distinction between three different levels of writing: [...]
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