Scientific Writing

Here are some guidelines to help you with your group project report.

Writing

Write in complete sentences. Make sure there are no grammar mistakes. Use your spell-checker. Be sure to proof read your writing. The spell-checker won't catch mistakes such as using "there" instead of "their," or "its" instead of "it's," or "effect" instead of "affect." Make sure your thoughts are organized in a logical manner. Start and end different sections of the paper with introductory and concluding sentences.

Formatting

The paper should be one-and-a-half spaced or double-spaced. Single spacing is not acceptable. Have a cover sheet listing the title, the authors, date and the class the assignment is for. All figures and tables should be numbered, and they should be numbered in the order in which they are discussed. Have one set of numbers for tables and another set of numbers for figures. When you refer to these tables or figures in your text, refer to them by number. You may either embed figures and tables within the text, or you may have them all at the end of your paper.

Have a reference list at the end of your paper. The recommended format for references is: Author (date) Title, Publisher, Pages. For example:

Lemke, K.A. (2002) Geomorphology Lab Manual (4th ed). UWSP Geography/Geology Department, Stevens Point, WI, 154 pp.

Be sure to cite any information or ideas that you get from someone or somewhere else. Citations provide validity to your statements. More citations help make your arguments stronger. Citations may either be embedded within a sentence or they may be placed at the end of a sentence. For example, you could say that we followed the methodology outlined by Lemke (2002) for completing our fieldwork. If you place a citation at the end of a sentence, then the entire citation goes in parentheses (Lemke, 2001). The period goes after the citation. You don't need a page number unless you have a direct quote, in which case the quote should either have quote marks at the beginning and end, or if the quote is long, it should be in its own paragraph, single spaced and indented from both left and right margins.

Headings

Divide your paper into sections and provide a heading for each section. If you need to divide major sections into subsections, pick a format that distinguishes major section headings from minor section headings. For example, major sections headings might be centered, bold and all capitals, while minor section headings might be left aligned, bold and upper/lower case. Basic sections you often see in scientific papers in the earth sciences include:

• Introduction
• Background or Literature Review
• Study Site Description
• Methodology or Data Analysis
• Results
• Conclusions or Summary
• Reference List
  

The sections you should have in your major research paper will be slightly different. You should have sections, with headings and subheadings, on:

• Introduction
• Data Analysis
• Results
  • Hypothesis 1
  • Hypothesis 2
  • Hypothesis 3
  • Hypothesis 4
  • Hypothesis 5
  • etc.
• Summary (or Conclusions)
• Reference List
  

The first section should always be an Introduction. Write a paragraph stating the objectives of the project. Explain what you hope to accomplish, or what kinds of hypotheses do you plan to test. In the same paragraph, explain the importance of the work to the discipline; in other words, why is this important to the field of geomorphology? Why do we need to know this stuff? Why should we care?

In the introduction you should also include a short paragraph on our study site (rather than having a separate section on the study site). We will not collect any descriptive information on the study site, so it doesn't make sense to have a section devoted to this. Instead, incorporate a basic description of our study site in the Introduction. Make some comments on the appearance and nature of the Tomorrow River where we did our fieldwork. For your information, the Tomorrow River is located in eastern Portage County and flows eastwards into the Wolf River. Stedman County Park, our study site, is located in southeastern Portage County near the county border. The drainage basin contains a glacial landscape. Normally you should include a map showing the location of the study site, but for our report, that isn't necessary.

The next section should be on Data Analysis. Explain here the steps taken to complete the project. This is an important part of the scientific method: explaining what you did and how you did it so that others can repeat the experiment. Valid scientific experiments are experiments that are repeatable. In summarizing your fieldwork, you can simply state that you followed the procedure outlined by Lemke (2002) instead of rewriting all the procedural information already in the Lab Manual, and then make sure you include Lemke (2002) in your reference list. You should include a copy of your channel profile in this section, the two summary data tables (Tables 6 and 7 in the exercise, although they will be numbered differently in your paper) and your sediment grain size distribution graph.

The majority of your report will fall in the Results section. You should have a subsection for each hypothesis. Be sure to have an introductory paragraph for each subsection that states the hypothesis. Use your textbook, lecture notes, other resources from the library, or logic to explain why the hypothesis should be true (or not), and how you expect this to appear in your results. This type of information often appears in the Background section, however, we will not have a background section. Instead, you should use background information to enhance the discussion of your results. It is critical to determine what we should expect to find for each hypothesis (based on logic, readings, or lecture) because this allows us to interpret our results in context. The context can alert us to situations where perhaps our field data are insufficient or inappropriate for reaching a conclusion regarding the hypothesis. Never arrive at a conclusion based solely on the field data without that context. So, after stating your expectations based on background information, discuss your results and whether they match your expectations. Based on that, you should then arrive at a conclusion as to whether the hypothesis is true or false. Or, you might arrive at the conclusion that our data are insufficient to, or our methodology inappropriate for, testing the hypothesis. In this case, be sure to discuss the problems with our data or our field and laboratory methodologies - what was wrong, and what should we have done instead. Include any charts or tables that you create to help you decide the truth of each hypothesis. Most of your figures and tables should be scatter plots and correlation coefficients. You may want to create a bar chart for hypothesis 4. Be sure to have a concluding paragraph (or sentence) for each subsection that states your decision regarding that hypothesis.

In the Conclusion, you should restate each of the hypotheses and what you discovered with regards to each of them. Your last hypothesis relates bed texture to various geometric and hydraulic characteristics by testing a number of sub-hypotheses. Try to reach some overall conclusion regarding the relationship between texture and hydraulics by considering all these sub-hypotheses as a group.