Assignment on writing for academic purposes is vital for Ph.D

It is important to know that writing for academic purposes is vital for Ph.D. students. In order to master writing and get your papers to be published, you need to learn all the required writing skills. There are so many ways to overcome writing difficulties, and one way is to carefully read books specializing in academic writing. In this review, I am introducing the book “Writing Scientific Papers in English successfully: Your Complete Roadmap”. This book was published in 2014 by eight authors, and it emphasizes the required scientific writing procedures to equip researchers of scientific fields with the necessary skills to write properly. The fundamentals of scientific writing, models for scientific writing, using corpus linguistics, writing tools, and many others are valued topics covered in the book. Each of these topics is supported by detailed explanations, figures, and tables to easily convey the notions. As a non-native English speaker, the writing task is a possible obstacle unless I overcome it by immersing myself in the field of technical writing. Since I am specialized in transportation engineering, I have realized that the above book will be a great support for me so that I can get the required knowledge to assist and facilitate the writing for publication purposes. Moreover, the book is giving so much valuable information which provides guidance and instruction in terms of technical writing, I will also try to asset and criticize some remarkable details from my point of view and try to evaluate how it enhances and reflects on my current writing skills .

 Aluisio et al. (2014) suggested that in order to interact with certain research, you need to have a profound perception of how valuable that research is. The authors also said that one way to get that perception is by asking some questions and trying to find the right answers for them. Thus, if you are able to answer the two following questions that means you possess a full context about your research and you should confidently proceed to the next steps of writing a scientific paper. The questions are: What can you add to the specific topic, which you are about to write, and what makes such additions to be valuable?

Likewise, the writers stated that an effective way for a person to convey his/her notions in well-written research is to find answers to the two following questions. What exactly does the author want to contribute? What makes these contractions to be so significant? Such questions would certainly simplify the writer's mission to deliver his or her concepts to the determined readers. By starting your writing, choosing the proper language according to your audience is crucial. If your target is specialists and experts, it is acceptable to utilize a high-level language in your writing due to the high expectations you expect from your audiences. In contrast, you should simplify your language so that the unspecialized readers can easily understand the content of your academic paper. To do that, it is recommended that you should provide the reader with enough examples, graphs, and figures. According to the book, technical writing usually has fixed patterns and exceeding them is not always allowed. Although creativity is strongly required when conducting research, you should not be innovative when it comes to wringing characteristics. Nevertheless, writers should follow the defined style which is required by the publisher. The hierarchy of content should be followed as title, abstract, introduction, methods, and materials, results and discussion, conclusion, and finally, references are the common structure of the scientific wring. Each part of the structure could be covered either profound or modest in accordance with the results found, discussion and the overall content.

Picking an attractive title is not the only requirement for having a good title; but, it should also feature all main text of the paper and hire the keywords related to the results of the research. Instead of reading the whole paper, the main contributions of the writer should be all reported in the abstract. The abstract is significantly vital as it contains either an informative or descriptive manner. For the descriptive way, it is favorable for writing a review of the scientific paper and a summary of a book since the content of the book can be written appropriately, whereas, for writing about results of certain scientific research, it is encouraged to be carried out in an informative way. A followed-up step of the structure of the scientific paper is the introduction which is a general explanation of the aspects of the research. The purpose of adding the introduction is to provide a reasonable explanation for which the paper is conducted. It should be started with an overall discussion of the subjects and provided with some questions related to the research main contributions. The methods and materials are the third part of the technical paper. It demonstrates the material, methodology, tools, and processes that are utilized in the study. The methods and materials are a fundamental part of researches associated with experiments; for example; conducting studies like physics, chemistry, and medicine.

However, for theoretical research such as mathematics, the methods and materials are rarely used. Next, to make sure that the readers absorb the content well, the writer has to include the results and discussion to the structure of the paper. The writer can use them to equip the readers with the needed descriptions and examples so that they can easily understand the findings of the study. Unlike the methods and materials, the results and discussion cannot be removed from the paper even whether it is a theoretical or non-theoretical academic paper. Also, the role of the result and discussion is to support the objectives and concepts previously mentioned in the abstract and introduction. In other words, all aspects of the scientific paper should be linked so that it is made sure not to have any ambiguity in the paper. Following up, the authors illustrate that the conclusion must the last section in the academic paper. It usually summarizes the study and covers the main part of it. It should clearly repeat not only the noteworthy outcomes but also the contributions to the area of the study. The writer may add his or her suggestions for future studies in order to assist any researcher interested in the topic to contribute more or fill in the gaps related to the study. References are considered the final category of the research paper. Builders place the last brick into a wall so that it is fully constructed. Likewise, references finalize the structure of the scientific paper so as not to make hard for the readers to go back to the previously published papers you used in your publication.

            The authors further explain that the skill of skimming of academic papers is required for researchers. Indeed, I do agree with the writers that the reader should take a look at the abstract, introduction, figures, and references after reading the title. Then, the readers can make a decision wither this article is going to be valuable for the study that one is about to conduct. In case the reader decides to proceed with the article, he/she ought to read the abstract carefully. By reading the abstract, the reader can find out more details about the paper, for instance, the type of problem, the method used to solve it, results with figures or tables and so on. Luckily, all that can be known by only reading a few sentences in the abstract, which is a really fast and effective way to get an idea of a paper. Afterward, the readers can duplicate the same method of the abstract and finally the researcher is supposed to acquire a full understating of the paper. It is evident that most of the international students lack an adequate amount of academic vocabulary, which can enhance their writing style. With this in mind, I could not agree with the authors more, the advantage of the collocation is countless. To know about collocation precisely, it is said that “In every language, there are expressions that are strung together and are used as a “unit.” These units will always sound “right” to a native speaker. For instance, in English you “dream about” something, whereas the “equivalent” in Spanish or Portuguese translates to “dream with” something. These units are called collocations.” (Aluisio et al. 2014, p. 86). To illustrate this, verbal collocations are particular nouns which usually come with determined verbs. For instance, noun (subject) + verb, on the other hand, nominal collocations are a combination of nouns. 

In short, the book has explained in detail about writing scientific papers in English successfully, and this book was reviewed in this article. This book was selected for the review because it was anticipated that it is full of information that I need to know and utilize for writing my academic paper. Consequently, so many benefits were observed while reading the book. One of the significant observations found in the book is how the structure of the scientific paper is commonly constituted beginning from the title until the references. Moreover, the review discussed several points mentioned in the book and evaluated their strengths and why they are so beneficial for technical writing tasks given to students.

 Reference

Aluisio et al. (2014). Writing Scientific Papers in English Successfully: Your Complete Roadmap. Hypertek.com, Inc