Cormac McCarthy is a Pulitzer prize-winning author. I am not. What we do have in common is that neither of us is a scientist. But we share a desire to impart good writing tips on the world. Cormac McCarthy’s platform is huge while I’m just happy if I can help anyone become a better writer. Most of the time I focus on my teenage daughters.

Come September, my youngest daughter will be studying engineering at a Canadian university. I have written about her interest in STEM before and there’s no question it influences my blogging topics. So with her – and you! – in mind, here are some solid science writing tips that both of you can employ. Most of them apply to writing in general.

First from Mr. McCarthy, a published author (10 novels), playwright and screenwriter, who also offers editing support to scientists. (I have read All the Pretty Horses and The Road, but you may also be familiar with No Country for Old Men.)

In 2019, his science writing tips were shared in a Nature career column. While language evolves and writing does too, his advice will be relevant for many years to come. In case you missed it, here is an abridged version of what he advises. (Read the full article for more details.)

• Use minimalism to achieve clarity. Remove extra words or commas whenever you can.
• Decide on your paper’s theme and two or three points you want every reader to remember. If something isn’t needed to help the reader to understand the main theme, omit it.
• Limit each paragraph to a single message. A single sentence can be a paragraph. Each paragraph should explore that message by first asking a question and then progressing to an idea, and sometimes to an answer. It’s also perfectly fine to raise questions in a paragraph and leave them unanswered.
• Keep sentences short, simply constructed and direct. Concise, clear sentences work well for scientific explanations. Minimize clauses, compound sentences and transition words — such as ‘however’ or ‘thus’ — so that the reader can focus on the main message.
• Don’t slow the reader down. Avoid footnotes […] jargon, buzzwords or overly technical language. And don’t use the same word repeatedly — it’s boring.
• Don’t over-elaborate. Only use an adjective if it’s relevant. Your paper is not a dialogue with the readers’ potential questions, so don’t go overboard anticipating them. Don’t say the same thing in three different ways in any single section. Don’t say both ‘elucidate’ and ‘elaborate’. Just choose one, or you risk that your readers will give up.
• Don’t worry too much about readers who want to find a way to argue about every tangential point and list all possible qualifications for every statement. Just enjoy writing.
• With regard to grammar, spoken language and common sense are generally better guides for a first draft than rule books. It’s more important to be understood than it is to form a grammatically perfect sentence.
• Commas denote a pause in speaking. Speak the sentence aloud to find pauses.
• Dashes should emphasize the clauses you consider most important — without using bold or italics — and not only for defining terms. (Parentheses can present clauses more quietly and gently than commas.) Don’t lean on semicolons as a crutch to join loosely linked ideas. This only encourages bad writing. You can occasionally use contractions such as isn’t, don’t, it’s and shouldn’t. Don’t be overly formal. And don’t use exclamation marks to call attention to the significance of a point. You could say ‘surprisingly’ or ‘intriguingly’ instead, but don’t overdo it. Use these words only once or twice per paper.
• Inject questions and less-formal language to break up tone and maintain a friendly feeling. Colloquial expressions can be good for this, but they shouldn’t be too narrowly tied to a region. Similarly, use a personal tone because it can help to engage a reader. Impersonal, passive text doesn’t fool anyone into thinking you’re being objective: “Earth is the centre of this Solar System” isn’t any more objective or factual than “We are at the centre of our Solar System.”
• Choose concrete language and examples. If you must talk about arbitrary colours of an abstract sphere, it’s more gripping to speak of this sphere as a red balloon or a blue billiard ball.
• Avoid placing [mathematical] equations in the middle of sentences. To separate equations from text, you can use line breaks, white space, supplementary sections, intuitive notation and clear explanations of how to translate from assumptions to equations and back to results.
• When you think you’re done, read your work aloud to yourself or a friend. Find a good editor you can trust and who will spend real time and thought on your work.
• Send your work to the journal editors. Try not to think about the paper until the reviewers and editors come back with their own perspectives. When this happens, it’s often useful to heed Rudyard Kipling’s advice: “Trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too.” Change text where useful, and where not, politely explain why you’re keeping your original formulation.
• Don’t rant to editors about the Oxford comma, the correct usage of ‘significantly’ or the choice of ‘that’ versus ‘which’. Journals set their own rules for style and sections. You won’t get exceptions.
• Finally, try to write the best version of your paper: the one that you like. You can’t please an anonymous reader, but you should be able to please yourself. Your paper — you hope — is for posterity. Remember how you first read the papers that inspired you while you enjoy the process of writing your own.

I don’t have a lot to add, but here are a few more tips.

• Vary the length of your paragraphs and also your sentences to make them more interesting for the reader. You don’t want every paragraph to contain the same number of sentences. Also, your sentences will be more interesting if some are short and some are long.
• My daughter (and others) thinks she needs to use “big words” to sound smart. Use the most appropriate word and use it correctly. Your aim should be clear, concise writing, not to wow the reader with your impressive vocabulary. You also don’t want to put your reader to sleep with complex, convoluted vocabulary that requires extra effort to understand.
• As much as you can, use the active voice in your writing.
• If you can remember those literary devices you learned in your English classes (such as metaphors, alliteration, foreshadowing and more), they add interest to your writing. Not all will be suitable for a science paper, but include them when you can – and in moderation.
• Always read your work out loud for phrasing, punctuation and to identify pauses.
• Have you been clear? Will your grandmother understand the points you are conveying?
• When you don’t have an editor, edit yourself and be ruthless. Cut out filler words (“in order to” is simply “to”). The best thing you can do is to walk away from your writing. When you review it later, you will be seeing it through fresh eyes and find the parts that aren’t working. It’s also a great technique for proofreading.

In a post about ComSciCon GTA, blogger Farah Qaiser shared some helpful books, recommended by freelance science journalist Dan Falk. They are: The Elements of Style, On Writing Well and The Craft of Science Writing.

If you are still eager for more, here is the audio of Cormac McCarthy discussing his writing process with Oprah.

The following two tabs change content below.

• Bio
• Latest Posts

Stacey Johnson

Stacey Johnson is the editor of Signals and a contributor. For 25 years, Stacey has been providing strategic communications counsel to government, corporate, technology and health organizations. She began her career at the CTV Television Network and then moved to Hill & Knowlton Canada where she advised clients in a variety of industries and sectors. Stacey is the Vice President, Communications and Marketing for CCRM, a leader in developing and commercializing regenerative medicine-based technologies and cell and gene therapies. She has a Master's degree in Public Relations. You can follow her on Twitter @msstaceyerin.

Latest posts by Stacey Johnson (see all)

• Right Turn: #pinksocks, diabetes news and other ramblings - June 24, 2025
• Right Turn: Some takeaways from Advanced Therapies Week 2025 - January 31, 2025
• Right Turn: The top 10 most-read blog posts in 2024 - January 2, 2025