Scientific audience

The objective of each thematic volume is to give the non-specialist reader, whether at the university or in industry, a comprehensive overview of an area where new insights of interest to a larger scientific audience are emerging. 

Besides the literature mentioned in the references, we would like to direct readers to a series of websites, whose purpose is to diffuse information on the current research on food and nutrition, endocrine disrupters, hormonal-dependent diseases, and biotechnologies, to a wider community of scientists and physicians as well as to a non-scientific audience. 

In this textbook, we focus on two audiences. In module 1 ( The Journal Article ) we focus on the expert audience, and in modules 2 and 3 ( The Scientific Poster and The Research Proposal ), we focus on the scientific audience. There are other genres that target these same audiences, such as technical memos and reports, but they are not covered in this textbook. An important goal of this... 

Is the last paragraph (P5) accessible to a scientific audience (as opposed to an expert audience), thereby completing the hourglass structure What larger implications do the authors present ... 

Audience and conciseness Are you writing for an expert audience, leaving out unnecessary details Try to find at least three sentences that can be written more clearly and concisely. Have you directed your closing comments (e.g., applications and/or implications) to a more scientific audience Check that you used we and hedging words appropriately. 

Abstracts and titles are generally written for expert and scientific audiences however, parts of each are also typically accessible to a student audience. For example, the abstract in the aldehydes-in-beer article targets professional food chemists and analytical chemists specifically, but a student in organic chemistry could read the abstract and understand which aldehydes are present in aged beer. Moreover, the student could also discern from the title that the article is about aldehydes in beer. 

The second audience comprises conference attendees, who read abstracts to determine whose talk to attend or poster to view. Because national conferences typically have multiple concurrent sessions, attendees rely on abstracts to make their decisions about what sessions to attend, where to go, and when. Individuals who read your abstract are likely to be in a related field of chemistry, but most likely will not be in your specific area of chemistry. Thus, it is important to keep your abstract general enough to be readily understood across different areas of science, thereby targeting primarily a scientific audience. In this regard, the conference abstract is more similar to the Introduction section of a journal article than to the abstract of a journal article, the latter written for an expert audience. 

If the audience is not clearly defined in the RFP, we recommend a two-tiered approach. When you introduce your ideas and describe the importance of your work, target a general to scientific audience ... 

The Project Summary is not the same as a journal article abstract (chapter 7) or a conference abstract (chapter 8), even though the Project Summary is sometimes called an abstract. The Project Summary summarizes work that has yet to be done and is written for a scientific audience. The journal article abstract summarizes work that has already been done and is written for an expert audience. The conference abstract describes work in progress and is written for a scientific audience. Because the Project Summary reiterates the major aspects of the proposed work, it is written last, after the Projection Description has been completed. For that reason, this chapter comes last in the research proposal module. 

The Project Summary lives on long after a project is completed. It should be written for a scientific audience and be able to stand on its own. 

When you proofread your Project Summary draft, make sure that you have written for a scientific audience, not an expert audience. Check to see that you have not used first-person pronouns and that you have used verb tenses appropriately. Finalize your Project Summary using suggested guidelines in chapter 18. 

Finalize who and what you are going to cite. Consider your audience. For expert and most scientific audiences, general information (found in textbooks) is not cited. 

Conciseness, a cornerstone of writing in chemistry, is expected by expert and scientific audiences. Revising and editing at this final stage offers additional opportunities to make your writing more concise. Consider the changes made in this example to achieve conciseness ... 

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