Informational Report
Samantha McLean
English 102
Informational Report
My
report is about writing in the Biology field compared to writing in the English
field. To learn about the differences I interviewed my brother Robert McLean
who is a scientist, and my Biology TA. I also gathered information from online.
Two academic sources and two nonacademic sources. In this report I will discuss
the main differences between writing a piece in Biology compared to English.
Writing
in English is what we were originally taught to do way back in Elementary
school. A teacher would give you a topic and told you just to write what ever
came to your head when you heard those words. Fairly easy right? Well, getting
older writing in English becomes more difficult. You learn how to write
different types of paper. You’re probably thinking what different types of
papers? Writing in English is easy all you do is express your thoughts. Well
you’re wrong. In English there are many different styles you learn like;
literary narratives, rhetorical analysis, argumentative analysis, summaries,
book reports and many more. Writing in English is all about placing all the
right sentences into one big piece. Or looking at something like a book or
picture and trying to think what the author was thinking, and what they were
meaning. If you take any course its going to be all about grammar and essay
building. Those are very important skills and are used in every type of
writing.
Writing
in Biology to me is a little bit easier. My mind doesn’t think like an English
teacher’s mind. I have more of a scientific mind where I need evidence to
support my answer and to help me come to the correct conclusion. I cant just
read a book and then write a piece on what the author was thinking and what the
message of the book was. My response is just ask the author. So writing in the
scientific world is a lot more natural for me. Writing in Biology is mostly
taking an experiment you did and writing up the lab report to justify your
findings. Writing in Biology there are many pieces to basically one type of
piece. You do a lab report most of the
time and you need to include an abstract, introduction, materials and methods,
results, discussion, and a works cited.
After
researching and interviewing people for this paper I have concluded that the
two are completely different. “I always felt I had a bit more freedom writing
for English class as opposed to science classes like biology.” Biology is more
strict than English. English you can write in any order you choose, and almost
any way you would like. “Reporting results in science papers requires one to
follow a very specific format describing your approach to the scientific method
(e.g. intro, methods, results, discussion), whereas for English papers seem to
allow more creativity in the way you get your message across; there's no required
format to follow.” For Biology there are
pieces to the whole piece. You have to justify your own work which may not seem
hard at first but that is usually the hardest part. Writing in Biology you have
to take your work and place it into another field and describe how it would
effect that field. But with this strict format sometimes it is easier for
people. Like me for example, when I am given the freedom I have no clue what to
do.
For which one is more useful it all
depends on what field you are going into in life. If you are going into a
science field obviously learning how to write scientific papers is going to be
more useful than the two small semesters of English you are just taking for a
requirement. Yes some things learned in English are going to help with writing
a Biology paper, like the grammar and the how to structure a sentence in the
correct way. But all the other stuff like how to analyze a book is not useful
to someone in the science world. As my brother says “ I suppose I would
like writing a biology paper better since it comes very easy to me; primarily
reporting what you're done and how it impacts the field. English papers
are somewhat more difficult as there is often a lot of interpretation of what
someone else is writing about, and that requires a lot more thought.” But just as things in English help with all
topics things in Biology help with all topics too. “I think scientific writing
has enhanced my ability to build a case for and justify any thoughts or
hypotheses I might have about anything, as well as how to present them in a
very clear way so that anyone reading my work, scientist or not, can understand
the message I'm trying to get across.”
Writing
in these two different fields are very different but a like in the same way.
They both have ways where they are similar but different. They share some of
the same qualities like making sure your audience understands you. Or making
sure you are writing to the correct audience. They both help with different
things and if you can do both than you would be considered a well-rounded
writer. For which one would be more useful in todays world, it really all
depends. If you go into a science field obviously nothing in English is really
going to help opposed to what you learn in Biology. And for the other way
around what your learn in English is probably going to be your career and
nothing in Biology would even be relevant.
Works cited:
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