Writing Modern Geoscience

Abstract

Scientific writing is a cornerstone component of modern geoscience practice. Despite this, the subject rarely benefits from any explicit instruction during graduate training. This editorial attempts to address that gap by providing a simplified approach to writing modern geoscience papers. Implementation of this approach requires aspiring scientific writers to first consider why we as scientists write papers and what our goals should be for our audience. From there, specific and detailed advice is provided on how to best structure the idea flow and presentation within each of the primary components of a peer-reviewed manuscript (e.g. introduction, methods, results, discussion, conclusions, and abstracts). Examples of annotated, illustrative text are provided throughout. Considerable attention is paid to the notion of a scientific paper as an argument (as presented primarily in it's discussion section) in favor of some proposition, and the key aspects of what makes an argument compelling. The goal is to provide new or struggling scientific writers with an explicit mechanism to construct impactful peer-reviewed manuscripts more easily.