The Scientific Essay
Photo credit: knowyourmeme.com
Science is huge. It's everywhere. It can be as big as Kanye's ego or as small as Snooki's IQ (or, uh, galaxies and atoms...I think those are more common comparisons). More than a million scientific papers are published each year and many more remain unpublished, not to mention pop culture translations like Buzzfeed science reporting.
With that kind of scale, it's easy to be intimidated by the giganticnormousness of it all, which makes coming to a blank page difficult. Luckily, hundreds of years of trial and error have produced an easy-to-follow format for exactly what you should say and when you should say it.
There are whole bunch of different types of scientific papers, the most common of which are research papers ("This is a moth. Moths live for a while, then they die. They eat things, and they bump into lights.") and reports of scientific findings ("We thought moths might not like being flushed down the toilet. We flushed a moth down the toilet. The moth did not appear to enjoy it, supporting our hypothesis."), but for now let's focus on a basic scientific essay.
A scientific essay has three parts: introduction, body, and conclusion. For a super helpful list of what you should include in each part, go here.
For reals, go there. I don't toil over a hot hyperlink all day for nothing. I'll wait.
You back? K, cool. Let's go.
General format
As with pretty much everything you write in an academic setting, you're going to follow basic formatting rules:
12 point Times New Roman font
Double-space
1-inch margins
Title centered on first page
Header with Name, Class/Period, and Date
That's a pretty safe default for an essay. However, pay attention to what your teacher wants--they may ask you to use APA paper formatting, since that's the typical format for other kinds of scientific papers. There will be another post going over the specifics of APA, so DON'T PANIC. (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, anyone? No? Just me?) In the meantime, there are all sorts of great sources online for how to write in APA, including the one that I just linked to.
Now that you know what it should look like, time to get into what it should sound like. Be sure to use third person point of view. That means using "he", "she", "it", or "they", and NO "I" or "you". There are very few times when someone will want you to talk about yourself in a scientific essay; they don't care what "I know" or "I think," they only care about how "it is."
Bad: I found out about this ice cream that glows when you lick it.
Good: Using proteins from jelly fish, scientists have developed an ice cream that glows when licked.
See the difference?
Also, cite your sources. Use in-text citations with APA format unless told otherwise. Spoiler alert: that link is to Purdue OWL. I link to OWL a lot--that's because OWL knows their stuff. OWL will be your best friend in college. Love the OWL. Live the OWL.
There are a couple other things to look out for in a science essay (like using passive voice, which is really easy to do when writing in third person and makes the reader 400% more likely to actually go into a coma by the fourth paragraph), but that should give you a good head start for what the paper should look like overall. Now we can get to the fun part--starting it.
Introduction
The introduction is the part where you let people know what's going on, what you're going to talk about, and why it matters. This is going to be the first thing people read, so you have to make it look like you know what you're talking about.
The first couple sentences are designed to hook the reader and make them keep reading. O
If an introduction has a shape, it's a pyramid flipped upside-down. You start out broad, then narrow your focus. For example, say you're talking about the recent discovery that there are four species of giraffes instead of just one. You wouldn't jump right into differentiation in the mitochondrial DNA of Giraffa camelopardalis vs Giraffa reticulata--you'd talk about giraffes first, details later.
Be sure to provide background information on what you're writing about. Pretend you're explaining this to a little kid or your Great Aunt Bertha who doesn't know anything about science but makes a mean lemon meringue pie. If you would have to stop and explain something to them, it's worth a mention in your paper.
A good introduction should act as road map for the rest of the essay. Briefly touch on the big points and topics so readers have an idea of where you're going. This also helps with writing the rest of the paper, since it makes you think about what the big points are to begin with. (For those of us who don't write an outline first and still have to figure out what we're trying to say while we're writing. For people who do use an outline--wow, way to be organized. I'm mad jealous of your outlining skillz.) (Please, if I ever use a Z instead of an S again, somebody throw a dictionary at me.)
Play your cards right, and your introduction will prepare readers for the meat of the paper--the body.
Body
"Body" is probably the most uselessly vague term for this part of a paper that has ever blighted the face of the Earth, but I'll go with it. All the magic happens in the body--this is where you get to show off everything you've learned and expand on the big points you touched on in the introduction.
I wish I had a work ethic like Kermit. Also, since I had a Sesame Street character earlier, I felt like I needed a Muppet for equal representation of beloved childhood felt-based characters.
Depending on your topic or the teacher's instructions, you may have sub-sections. Papers reporting scientific findings from experiments have pretty standardized sections such as Materials, Methods, Results, and Discussion, but the sections in a normal scientific essay are more dependent on what you're writing about. If you're writing about the element carbon, for example, possible sections might include Molecular Structure, Occurrences, Uses, the Carbon Cycle, etc. If you're talking about Shia Labeouf, it might be Holes, Transformers, and Inevitable Meltdown/Slow Descent Into Complete Chaotic Madness.
Photo credit: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVbplK9McB0
(Yeah, he really did that.)
Writing out the sub-section headings before anything else can help you organize your thoughts about what you need to say. Not sure what sub-sections you want to use? Go to Wikipedia. Although Wikipedia doesn't make a good source for ANYTHING academic, almost all of their articles are split up into different sections, which can act as an example for what someone else thought was important when splitting up the topic. Just don't use copy-and-paste headings from there; they might talk about things that aren't relevant to what you want to say, and besides, you should be doing the thinking here, not the Internet.
As with any essay, make sure that your ideas are clearly stated and well-founded. No beating around the bush, and no using information without having a source. (And cite it. CITE EVERYTHING.)
If you can't find good sources to back what you're saying, you're going to have to rethink your idea.
If people can't understand what you're saying, you're going to have to rethink how you say it.
Examples:
Bad: Iron is an important element and can be found in a lot of places, especially in humans and steel things like nails and buildings, but it's most important in humans and even other animals because it helps blood cells.
Good: Blood cells use iron to aid in transporting oxygen throughout the body (Clark, 2008).*
*I made this citation up because I didn't actually use a source for this fact; it's something I knew off the top of my head, which is fine because this is a blog post, not a scientific essay. I don't know who Clark is, but he's probably a nerd.
Clear writing is often shorter than winding, confusing writing. That's because you're taking out all the other ideas that distract from your main point. Every writing teacher or book I've ever encountered has said that pairing down a paper almost always improves it. Have a word/page count you need to meet and coming up short? Add more explanations or examples directly related to your topic.
This GIF is unrelated to anything I'm talking about. Don't be this GIF.
Once you've discussed everything you need to, it's time to move on to the conclusion.
Conclusion
If you have section headers in the body of the paragraph, it's a good idea to make one for the conclusion as well.
The conclusion is like a mirror image of the introduction. Just like you summarized your main points in the introduction, you restate them in the conclusion. Talk about what you learned and why it's important (but remember to keep it in third person).
The shape of the conclusion is a right-side-up pyramid. Start out with the details you found out, then get broader to how they apply to the real world and what they tell us about the topic overall. Answer the question "So what?" Iron transports oxygen. So what? Brad and Angelina are getting a divorce. So what? Answering this question is crucial because it ties everything together and makes the reader care.
Going back to the giraffe example I used for the introduction, you might summarize that the four species of giraffes show differences in their mitochondrial DNA (plus any other key points you made), then open it up to what this means for giraffes. Like the ideas in the paper's body, the conclusions you draw here should be well-stated and well-founded; otherwise we get to the end of the paper and have no idea what your point was.
And there you have it, a scientific essay in a nutshell. For more information about scientific essays and how to set them up, write them, and just as importantly, how not to write them, check out this awesome guide from the lovely folks at St Andrews University. Seriously, they've got some good stuff.
And I'm including this just because I like it:
Photo credit: https://ifunny.co/tags/sciencesideoftumblr/1450738683
References:
Searcy, H. (n.d.). Writing in Science. Retrieved September 26, 2016, from http://www.monash.edu/lls/llonline/writing/science/6.xml
