Skip to Main Content

Writing for maths and sciences

Expert guidance from Study Advice at the University of Reading

Writing for maths

As with all communications, written or otherwise, you will need to consider your audience and purpose:

  • Your audience is your tutor or whoever is going to read your work and mark it.
  • Your purpose is to persuade your reader that you understand what is involved in solving the problem you’ve been working on, and haven’t just accidentally stumbled across the correct answer.

So, for instance, rather than just stating the equations you’ve used, you need to tell your reader how you’ve used them by writing in sentences. A good way to think about this is to consider mathematical symbols as an abbreviation for a unit of information, which you can build into a sentence.

For example:

Let y = x⁴ + 2x². Then y is positive.

The other key principle with writing in maths is that you must make sure that everything is written in a logical order. What did you do first? What followed that? Your written work should enable your reader to do exactly the same as you did and come to the same result.

Writing for the sciences

Scientific writing aims to be clear and precise, so that every reader will get the same understanding from what they have read. There are some simple rules to remember which will help you achieve this.

 
1. Choose your words carefully

Spend time on making sure you are using the correct word: not necessarily the longest or most complicated word, but the one which is going to convey your meaning most clearly to your reader. One thing to especially look out for is vague and subjective descriptions like ‘large’ or ‘good’. You might think that a doorway is large, but your taller friend might think quite the opposite.

 
2. Use the past tense

You will often be reporting on something you have done, such as a practical, an experiment or a research task. This is something that happened in the past, so you should use the past tense when you write:

  • The temperature was recorded.
  • Participants were chosen from the second group.
 
3. Passive rather than active voice

The convention in most scientific writing is to use the passive rather than the active voice:

In the active voice, the focus of the sentence is on someone actively doing something:

  • I conducted the experiment under carefully controlled conditions.

In the passive voice, the focus of the sentence is on something passively having something done to it: 

  • The experiment was conducted under carefully controlled conditions.

 

The passive voice makes scientific writing feel more objective so it is usually preferred. However, if using it makes your sentences much longer and more complicated, remember the rule that scientific writing should be concise, and use the active voice where necessary.

 
4. Write in a logical order

Like mathematical writing, scientific writing should always follow a logical order. You will need to describe each task in the order in which it occurred.

Here’s a good way to think about how this works:

Why did I do it?

This is your introduction, where you explain what the aims are, and (in a longer piece of writing) the background and context, including research that has been done previously on the same topic.

What did I do?

This is your methods section, where you describe what you did.

What did I find out?

This is your results or findings section, where you relate what you found out, perhaps including graphs or tables if they are the best way of communicating the information.

What does it mean?

These are your discussion and conclusion sections, where you show what your results tell you about the aims you set out in the introduction.
 
5. Consider how much detail you need

The amount of detail you will need to include may vary according to the assignment. So if you are writing up a lab practical, you may need to be very concise and succinct. If you are writing up a more extensive piece of research, you may need to include more background and support your discussion with reference to academic reading. Check your assignment instructions, and be ruthless in cutting out any unnecessary details.