RECOMMENDATIONS ON THE WRITING
OF SCIENTIFIC PAPERS IN ENGLISH
By CLEUMAR & DANIELSON
English is the main communication language utilized by the international scientific community in conferences and journals. Nevertheless, it is not the native language for the majority of the researchers, and so they have many challenges to express their ideas in an intelligible English to their audience. One of the higher challenges is “to make the writing a pleasure to reader not a confusing slog for your readers”. This requires a good knowledge of grammar, orthography and vocabulary, and in consequence it is common to find who have any work refused for publication because the reviewers could not understand their manuscripts.
The first step to write a good scientific paper is adequately to choose the conference or journal. A careful reading of their latest issues and objectives and verification of their relevance using, e.g., the impact factor (a citations measure of a journal), can help the choosing. Afterwards, it is important to verify the guide for authors. It is normally provided and indicates the format rules, templates and instructions for submissions.
With the template and using the specified format, there are things to keep in mind while on the writing process:
a) Avoid repeating too often the same word or expression;
b) Keep sentences fairly short;
c) Pay attention when using the definite and indefinite articles “the”, “a” and “an”;
d) Plagism must be avoided. If a sentence need to be copied, for some reason, put it in the italic form or between “quotation marks”;
e) Use action verbs, not words that express actions, e.g., “our group investigated the problem” instead of “our group conducted an investigation of the problem”.
f) Use correctly the punctuation;
g) A short title associated to a good abstract are very important to sell the proposed ideas and objectives;
h) A good orthographical and grammatical revision must be provided, where even natives or adept people could be consulted;
i) The use of English-English dictionaries and thesaurus are good allies and can really help;
j) Do not hurry with the first attempting, because mistakes and errors will occur. The important is to make an intelligible text. So, no not give up and be diligent.
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