Product Description

This best-selling writing guide by a prominent biologist teaches students to think as biologists and to express ideas clearly and concisely through their writing.

              

Providing the reader  with the tools they'll need to be successful writers in college and their profession, A Short Guide to Writing about Biology emphasizes writing as a way of examining, evaluating, and sharing ideas. The text teaches  how to read critically, study, evaluate and report data, and how to communicate information clearly and logically.

 

Also given detailed advice on locating useful sources, interpreting the results of statistical tests, maintaining effective laboratory and field notebooks, writing effective research proposals and poster presentations, writing effective applications, and communicating information to both professional and general audiences.

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6306 in Books
• Published on: 2009-07-12
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

From the Back Cover
Emphasizing writing as a means to examining, evaluating, sharing, and refining ideas, A Short Guide to Writing about Biology helps its readers get more out of their reading, lab work, education, and experience. More than a "writing guide," this book teaches readers to think as biologists and to then express that thinking clearly and concisely through their writing and speaking. With comprehensive coverage on how to read and evaluate articles, how to interpret and describe the results of statistical tests, how to maintain laboratory and field notebooks, and how to communicate information concisely and convincingly to professional and general audiences, this book is a "must have" for anyone aspiring to a career in biology. This edition also provides considerable emphasis on the Internet and work with computers in Biology. For anyone aspiring to a career in biology.

About the Author
Jan A. Pechenik is Professor of Biology at Tufts University, where he has been teaching and doing research since 1978. He obtained his B.A. in Zoology from Duke University and his Ph.D. in Biological Oceanography from the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island. To date he has published over 50 papers on the development and metamorphosis of marine invertebrate animals, including snails, blue mussels, crabs, barnacles, polychaetes, bryozoans, and parasitic flatworms.Professor Pechenik has also published a successful textbook on invertebrate biology, currently in its 3rd edition, and chairs the Division of Invertebrate Zoology within the Society for Comparative and Integrative Biology (formerly the American Society of Zoologists). Committed to teaching as well as research, his highly praised book on this subject, A Short Guide to Writing About Biology, has just appeared in a fourth edition.

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Customer Reviews

An essential for all students.
As a university professor teaching budding biologists, I've found this book to be excellent. As the other reviewer said, I wished I had this book when I was a student. I, too, had to learn things the long and hard way. Pechinik has done a great service to science students. Let's hope we see more good writing out of this next generation of young scientists.

Must-Have for science lab reports
I never buy anything unnecessary for my classes, it just creates unneeded clutter and stress for me. This book, however, takes the stress out of writing lab reports. It's on the pricey side, but it pays for itself. Even when I get stuck on writing a part of a report, I go back to this book and I find what I was doing wrong and/or how to go on. You can go through the different sections in the book to find something or you can refer to its very handy index at the back.

Jan Pechenik even gives examples for every part of your report (e.g., she lets you see what an introduction looks like, what a bibliography looks like, etc.). This book is for the neophytes, giving them the basics and also for the professional scientist, telling them how to format their papers for peer-reviewed scientific journals.

Ever since I've had this (I have the 5th edition, but I lost it, so I'm going to order this 6th edition...can't live without it!), it's really hard to get a bad grade on a lab report. I used to have problems with writing captions for my tables and figures, but now they actually are articulate without having my rambling tone embedded in there.

The best book for writing lab reports in college.
Every time I have to do a lab report, I use this book. No exceptions. Although I cannot comment on the other aspects of the book in (check out the "Look Inside!" Table of Contents), its guidance for writing lab reports is helpful to the utmost. Before this book, I made in the high 80s on my lab reports; now it is rare that I go below a 95. The book is full of what to do and, more importantly, what not to do. For example, never give purpose to evolution (I am paraphrasing, of course). Birds did not evolve flight to escape predators or to travel long distance; they evolved flight because a series of random DNA mutations turned forelimbs into wings, and that increased their survival rate. That is just one of numerous examples, and, best of all, all of the examples given are extremely relevant to college students because the material comes from college-level lab reports. Still, all of my biology professors have this book, in one edition or anther, on their shelves. This review refers to the 5th edition.