Explain why one experiment leads to another explain why you’ve done what you’ve done. You want to guide your reader down that road as smoothly as possible you want no gaping holes in the road, no sudden jumps in logic. Think of your paper as a road leading from the Introduction to the Discussion. But your task as an author is to make your scientific manuscript as easy for a reader to follow as possible. As stated in point (4) above, how do your results build upon what was previously known in the field? Are your results novel? Are you the first one to have discovered that protein “X” is involved in, say, DNA damage repair? If you’re the first one to demonstrate this, then say so. You must also be clear as to the context of your results. The key results should always be given in the Abstract and Discussion, and I advise also briefly stating your key results again at the end of the Introduction. If you emphasize one set of experimental results in the Abstract, a different set of results in the Introduction, and a third set of results in the Discussion, you will confuse your readers. You don’t want your readers to have to guess what’s important about your paper tell them what’s important. These key points take the form of your key results and their implications, and these points should be consistently emphasized. You should be clear as to the key points of your paper. Points (1) and (2) form the basis of your Introduction and Material and Methods, while points (3)-(5) form the basis of the Results and Discussion sections (in some journals, the Results and Discussion sections are combined into a single section).

The storyline is elaborated at length through your manuscript as a whole. This storyline is given in condensed form in the Abstract section of your paper. (5) What are the implications of your results? (4) How are your results and/or methods novel and important? How do they build upon the previous work in the field? (2) What did you do to address this question or problem? Were the methods or approach novel?

(1) What major question or problem does your paper address, and why is that issue important? Your storyline must address the following: From those key points you will build your narrative or storyline. When putting a manuscript together, I find it easiest to first articulate the key points you want the reader to understand and remember. You need to distill months and possibly years of hard work-trial-and-error, painstaking optimization and entirely serendipitous discovery– into a clear, coherent, succinct narrative. You need to make those connections clear to the reader. Presumably, the experiments detailed in your manuscript are all connected in some way. I mean, first of all, that your manuscript is a story, not a “data dump.” Your manuscript is not a collection of miscellaneous observations and experiments it is not a place to dump data without interpretation or explanation. If I could give one piece of advice on manuscript writing to my editing clients, it would be this: your manuscript should tell a clear story.

I know that scientific research is complicated and rarely goes according to plan: experiments fail or give contradictory results. I have worked as a scientist, and I have worked as a scientific writer and editor. It does not store any personal data.On writing a scientific manuscript: tell a clear story Part I: An overview on structuring your storyline The cookie is set by the GDPR Cookie Consent plugin and is used to store whether or not user has consented to the use of cookies. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category 'Performance'. This cookie is set by GDPR Cookie Consent plugin. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category 'Other. The cookies is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category 'Necessary'. The cookie is set by GDPR cookie consent to record the user consent for the cookies in the category 'Functional'. The cookie is used to store the user consent for the cookies in the category 'Analytics'. These cookies ensure basic functionalities and security features of the website, anonymously. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly.

Editing scientific manuscripts