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| Preface | |
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| General Advice about Writing and Reading Biology | |
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| Introduction and General Rules | |
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| What Do Biologists Write about, and why? | |
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| The Keys to Success | |
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| Ten major rules for preparing a first draft | |
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| Six major rules for developing your final draft | |
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| Eight finer points: the easy stuff | |
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| The annoying but essential final pass | |
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| On Using Computers in Writing | |
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| On Using Computers for Data Storage, Analysis, and Presentation | |
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| Summary | |
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| Getting the Most from Your Word-Processing Program | |
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| Locating Useful Sources | |
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| Using Indexes | |
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| Using Science Citation Index | |
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| Using Current Contents | |
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| Using Medline and Other Databases | |
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| Prowling the Internet | |
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| Conducting Web Searches: Developing Productive Search Strategies | |
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| Final Thoughts about Efficient Searching: Technology Isn't Everything | |
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| Closing Thoughts | |
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| Summary | |
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| Using Search Engines Effectively | |
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| General Advice on Reading and Note-Taking | |
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| Why Read and What to Read | |
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| Effective Reading | |
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| Reading Data: Plumbing the Depths of Figures and Tables | |
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| Reading Text: Summarize as You Go | |
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| Plagiarism and Note-Taking | |
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| Plagiarism | |
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| Take notes in your own words | |
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| Split-page note-taking: A can't-fail system | |
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| Final thoughts on note-taking: Document your sources | |
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| Summary | |
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| Reading and Writing About Statistical Analyses | |
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| Statistical Essentials | |
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| Variability and its representation | |
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| When is a difference a meaningful difference? What you need to know about tomatoes, coins, and random events | |
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| Establishing a null hypothesis | |
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| Conducting the analysis, and interpreting the results | |
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| Degrees of freedom | |
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| Summary: Using Statistics to Test Hypotheses | |
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| Moving Beyond p-Values | |
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| Statistical power | |
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| Effect magnitudes | |
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| Reading about Statistics | |
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| Writing about Statistics | |
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| Citing Sources and Listing References | |
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| Citing Sources | |
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| Summary of Citation Format Rules | |
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| Preparing the Literature Cited Section | |
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| Listing the references-General rules | |
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| Listing the references-Using the correct format | |
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| A Sample Literature Cited Section | |
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| Bibliographic Management Software | |
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| Producing Hanging Indents | |
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| Revising | |
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| Preparing the Draft for Surgery: Plotting Idea Maps | |
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| Revising for Content | |
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| Revising for Clarity | |
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| Taming disobedient sentences-Sentences that don't say what the author means | |
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| The dangers of It | |
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| Problems with and | |
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| Headache by acronym | |
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| Revising for Completeness | |
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| Revising for Conciseness | |
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| First commandment: Eliminate unnecessary prepositions | |
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| Second commandment: Avoid weak verbs | |
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| Third commandment: Do not overuse the passive voice | |
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| Fourth commandment: Make the organism the agent of the action | |
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| Fifth commandment: Incorporate definitions into your sentences | |
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| Revising for Flow | |
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| A short exercise in establishing coherence | |
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| Improving flow using punctuation | |
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| Revising for Teleology and Anthropomorphism | |
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| Revising for Spelling Errors | |
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| Revising for Grammar and Proper Word Usage | |
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| A grammatical aside: Rules-that-are-not-rules | |
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| A strategy for revising: Pass by pass by pass | |
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| Becoming a Good Reviewer | |
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| Receiving criticism | |
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| Fine-tuning | |
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| Sentences in need of revision | |
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| Checklist | |
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| Tracking Changes Made to Documents | |
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| Guidelines for Specific Tasks | |
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| Writing Summaries and Critiques | |
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| Writing the First Draft | |
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| Writing the Summary | |
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| Sample Student Summary | |
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| Analysis of student summary | |
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| Writing the Critique | |
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| The critique | |
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| Analysis of student critique | |
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| Concluding Thoughts | |
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| Writing Essays and Review Papers | |
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| Why Bother? | |
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| Getting Started | |
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| Researching Your Topic | |
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| Developing a Thesis Statement | |
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| Writing the Paper | |
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| Getting underway: Taking and organizing your notes | |
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| The crucial first paragraph | |
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| Supporting your argument | |
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| The closing paragraph | |
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| Citing Sources | |
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| Creating a Title | |
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| Revising | |
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| Checklist | |
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| Writing Laboratory and Other Research Reports | |
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| Why Are You Doing This? | |
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| The Purpose of Laboratory and Field Notebooks | |
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| Taking notes | |
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| Making drawings | |
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| Components of the Research Report | |
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| Where to Start | |
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| When to Start | |
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| Writing the Materials and Methods Section | |
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| Determining the correct level of detail | |
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| Giving rationales | |
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| Describing data analysis | |
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| Use of subheadings | |
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| A model materials and methods section | |
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| Writing the Results Section | |
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| Summarizing data using tables and graphs | |
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| Constructing a summary table | |
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| To graph or not to graph | |
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| Preparing graphs | |
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| (Not) falsifying data | |
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| The question: To connect or not to connect the dots? | |
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| Making bar graphs and histograms | |
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| Learning to love logarithms | |
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| Preparing tables | |
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| Making your graphs and tables self-sufficient | |
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| Putting your graphs and tables in order | |
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| Incorporating figures and tables into your report (or not) | |
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| Verbalizing results: General principles | |
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| Verbalizing results: Turning principles into action | |
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| What is a "figure"? | |
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| Writing about negative results | |
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| Writing about numbers | |
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| In anticipation-Preparing in advance for data collection | |
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| Citing Sources | |
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| Writing the Discussion Section | |
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| Expectations | |
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| Explaining unexpected results | |
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| Analysis of specific examples | |
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| Writing the Introduction Section | |
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| Stating the question | |
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| An aside: Studies versus experiments | |
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| Providing the background | |
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| A sample introduction | |
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| Talking about Your Study Organism or Field Site | |
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| Deciding on a Title | |
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| Writing an Abstract | |
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| Preparing an Acknowledgments Section | |
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| Preparing the Literature Cited Section | |
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| Preparing a Paper for Formal Publication | |
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| Checklist for the Final Draft | |
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| Using Computer Spreadsheets for Data Collection | |
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| Graphing with Excel | |
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| Writing Research Proposals | |
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| What Are Reviewers Looking For? | |
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| Researching Your Topic | |
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| What Makes a Good Research Question? | |
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| Writing the Proposal | |
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| Introduction | |
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| Background | |
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| Proposed research | |
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| Citing references and preparing the literature cited section | |
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| Tightening the Logic | |
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| The Life of a Real Research Proposal | |
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| Checklist | |
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| Answering Essay Questions | |
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| Basic Principles | |
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| Applying the Principles | |
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| Writing a Poster Presentation | |
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| Layout of the Poster | |
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| Making the Poster | |
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| Checklist for Making Posters | |
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| Writing for a General Audience: Science Journalism | |
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| Science Journalism Based on Published Research | |
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| The simple statement and bullet leads | |
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| The narrative lead | |
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| The surprise or paradox lead | |
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| Science journalism in action: An example | |
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| Journalism Based on an Interview | |
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| Preparing Oral Presentations | |
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| Talking about Published Research Papers | |
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| Preparing the talk | |
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| Giving the talk | |
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| Talking about Original Research | |
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| Talking about Proposed Research | |
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| The Listener's Responsibility | |
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| Preparing Effective Slides and Overheads | |
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| The Pros and Cons of PowerPoint Presentations | |
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| Checklist for Being Judged | |
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| Writing Letters of Application | |
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| Before You Start | |
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| Preparing the Resume | |
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| Preparing the Cover Letter | |
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| Recruiting Effective Letters of Recommendation | |
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| The Disassembled Paragraph Reconstituted (From Chapter 6) | |
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| Revised Sample Sentences | |
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| Revised Sample Sentences in Final Form | |
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| Commonly Used Abbreviations | |
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| Suggested References for Further Reading | |
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| Sample Form for Peer Review | |
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| Some Useful Web Sites | |
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| Using the Paper Versions of Leading Indexing Services | |
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| Index | |