Customer Reviews

Writing Papers in the Biological Sciences

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Our biology department adopted this book as the writing guide for our biology majors a couple of years ago. It includes information about how to seek for and use biological literature, how to present data (including graphs and figures) in the context of scientific writing, and it has a great section on writing research papers. There are ample examples in the book that students can use as models.

The author presents information on framing the paper, and how to use drafts in order to produce a good product. There is also a section that addresses other kinds of writing skills used by biologists -- oral presentations, poster development, writing research proposals, and letters of application.

We encourage students to use this book in all of their courses. It is a required support text for Principles of Biology I and II, and for our junior level Orientation to Research course.

I appreciate the fact that the book is spiral bound. That makes it possible for you to have the book open by other things you are working on without it flipping shut all the time, like it would if it had a regular binding.

This book with less than 200 pp. works well for us and our students. I think it could work well for you, too.

Alan Holyoak, Coordinator of Biological Research, Manchester College, IN

Both college students and professors will find this book very useful as a beginning guide to preparing written and oral reports. Every biology student should own this informative, easy-to-use book.

Used it for scientific research papers in college. Great reference, easy to understand, plenty of examples.

This is a good guide to write papers. It is a little hard to follow but I do recommend this book. This guide was recommended to by my Marine Ecology professor.

When you have to get a text book, amazon is an economical way to get one instead of the university book store. This arrived in 2 days and in good shape. I will look for books here every semester

Now, granted that I did not experience the world of biological science writing before "the McMillan book", but by all that's ecological, people find this book HELPFUL? The academic world must have been a whole lot more chaotic than I can imagine before McMillan wrote her book, because damn, I can't imagine a more confusing text that is supposed to help students. Sure, McMillan provides examples of how to cite and write (to name a few examples) a research paper, but every time I'm looking for a specific bit of information I can't find what I'm looking for! I'm pretty careful about throwing around the phrase "I hate", but every time I look at this book I can feel the rage and frustration rise inside of me. Helpful. SURE it is.