Different Formats/Writing Science Essays/Additional Tips

Additional Tips: Peer Review and Creating and Using Writing Outlines

Before you start to put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard), you should produce a writing outline. Although it can seem like wasted time, you will find that producing a detailed ‘roadmap’ will help you organize your writing much more efficiently. It will almost certainly save you time in the long run, and will also help you compartmentalize the different tasks associated with your essay, making them seem more manageable.

Once you have written your essay by using the outline, you can start to edit it and add in transitions to make each sentence flow smoothly into the next one. Although the content is the most important part, you should not underestimate the importance of transitional words and phrases in helping to develop a smooth, logical development.

Scientific communication often relies on a rigorous peer review process, in which scientists in similar fields read and then critique each other’s written work, before allowing the original author(s) to respond and alter their work to improve it.

Whether you are writing a journal-style article/lab report, an essay, or a blog post, it is always a valuable exercise to ask someone to review your work before submitting it; this is especially true for essays, because your aim is to produce a convincing, logical argument, but it can be hard to be objective about your own work and so what seems to make perfect sense to you might not be clear to someone else. Often, it is only when someone reads your work and provides you with feedback that you see some holes in your logical development.

With this in mind, we advise you to ask a peer tutor or friend to read your work before you submit it; if they follow your argument and seem convinced at the end, you have probably done a good job! Either way, their feedback as readers will be helpful for you as you revise and take your work to the next level.