A lot of students think that their college careers start after they graduate high school, but that’s a misnomer. The skills you need for college, especially if you’re interested in the sciences, start back in high school, and there’s a lot you can do as a student in your freshman, sophomore, junior, or senior year of high school that will improve your aptitude for college courses. While there are many skills that writing services can help you improve on and develop along the way to help you with your scientific writing, here are four additional skills you can learn in high school and carry with you to college to help improve your scientific writing skills.
Skill #1: Summarizing what’s happening in an experiment
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How to improve this skill: Visit your school library or check out some online databases to read more research reports. Reading is one of the best ways to improve your writing, period, and if you want to learn how to write more scientifically and to understand how to summarize a scientific experiment, you need to first learn how other people in the field write their summaries. Once you get a strong feel for what academically advanced scientific summary looks like for an experiment, you’ll be better equipped to explain what’s happening in your own work. Not only will you expand your vocabulary, you’ll also be learning the proper techniques and protocols and how to explain them to a scientific community.
Skill #2: Outlining the methodology of a project
How to improve this skill: Reading is, again, a big one here. But outside of reading more scientific reports and seeing how their methodology sections are written, you can actually start practicing writing methodologies by looking past research reports and rewriting their methodologies in your own words. Once you have practiced rewriting methodology sections of multiple published experiments, go back and see if what you wrote makes the same sort of sense as the published reports. This is a great writing trick that not only helps you adapt to the language and structure of written scientific works but also challenges you to think of these past experiments and methods used in new terms. Once in college, you’ll be doing your own experiments and writing your own methodologies either based on your class readings or based on the experiment set up by the person running your class or lab, but you don’t have to wait until then to start writing methodologies and familiarizing yourself with their format.
Skill #3: Writing lab reports
How to improve this skill: Ask your teachers if there’s any additional lab work you can do or for more detailed feedback on the lab reports you do write and turn in. Better yet, and we know this sounds like a lot of extra work, but after you’ve made your first round of corrections, ask your teacher for further feedback. This process of experimenting, writing a lab report, getting feedback on your writing, revising based on that feedback, then writing the report again parallels the work you will be doing in college. The extra practice writing will not only help you improve your ability to write lab reports, but the guided feedback from your professor will help you strengthen the areas you need improvement and get you used to the revision process that you’ll be facing regularly in college.
Skill #4: Communicating your results or ongoing work
How to improve this skill: Connect with other students interested in science, or form writing groups in which you share and go over each other’s conclusions and written assignments. One of the hardest parts of writing for the sciences is to make sure your results are clear in writing and the conclusions you are drawing connect from your research connect for your reader. While you only have your own point of view when writing a scientific research report and drawing your conclusions, you can have friends, classmates, teachers, family, and community members who have interest in your work read over your research reports and let you know if your communication skills are on par. If whoever you are sharing your work with are able to understand and explain back your results section to you, then you’ve done a great job. You don’t have to wait for a college community to get started on improving the communicability of your writing.
These four skills are ones that begin in high school, sometimes even junior high school, and are important to improve if you wish to engage in the sciences after high school is over. You can work on improving your ability to read scientific research, write to the genre of scientific research, execute sound and strong lab reports, and communicate the results of your research well before you hit a college classroom. While not every high school is equipped to teach you the skills you need, there are lab report writing services out there that can help. Sometimes all it takes is someone with the right writing and scientific background to help you learn how to improve these skills. If you are unable to connect with a teacher to do this kind of work, or if your school isn’t well equipped with resources that can help you access scientific journals and lab reports, there is still hope and there is still help to develop the skills you need to excel in a college classroom when it comes to your scientific writing skills.