The Craft of Scientific Communication

“The Craft of Scientific Communication demonstrates quite powerfully that no scientist can survive professionally without writing well. Writing well, according to Gross and Harmon, is less a matter of following formulas and templates than it is a creative process of strategic decision-making based on the writer’s purpose and intended audience. This book enters a crowded room of ‘how to’ books for scientific authors but emerges as a unique contribution due to the authors’ extensive research of scientific communication that provides the intellectual history and social functions of the very features of good writing that scientific authors must master.”

“Harmon and Gross distill key lessons of scientific composition from exemplar articles. By parsing both overall structures and individual sentences, they show us the relationship between scientific rhetoric and scientific thinking. Exercises allow the reader to try out those lessons and internalize the ideas. Harmon and Gross’s clear guidelines and checklists will help scientists focus on the key concepts they need to build their own arguments. The suggestions they give will help scientific authors achieve their scientific goals.”