Different Formats/Writing Journal Style Articles/Additional Tips

Additional Tips: Tense Consistency

Try not to confuse your readers by mixing tenses in the same sentences. It can often be easy to do this when writing about science in this format, because you are talking about your experiment (which has already happened), and then linking it to theory, which is still evolving (happening now, and continuing to happen in the future).

To help, try to refer to your experiment in the past tense and then mention its link to other work in the present or future tenses – but do this in different sentences. The Methods and Results sections should be written entirely in the past tense because these things have already happened (you have conducted your experiment and you have gathered your results).