The Science of Scientific Writing (pdf)

This article deals not with the organization of a lab report, but rather the organization of sentences and paragraphs within scientific writing. For those who have often heard from their readers that their writing is hard to follow and unclear, this article may prove to be a turning point in your writing career. Topics covered include writing with the reader’s expectations in mind, limiting the separation between the subject and the verb, and placing new information in the stress position. Though this article was written in 1990, the content is timeless, especially for writers of complex ideas, such as writers of science.