The ability to communicate in print and person is essential to the life of a successful scientist. But since writing is often secondary in scientific education and teaching, there remains a significant need for guides that teach scientists how best to convey their research to general and professional audiences. The Craft of Scientific Communication will teach science students and scientists alike how to improve the clarity, cogency, and communicative power of their words and images.

In this remarkable guide, Joseph E. Harmon and Alan G. Gross have combined their many years of experience in the art of science writing to analyze published examples of how the best scientists communicate. Organized topically with information on the structural elements and the style of scientific communications, each chapter draws on models of past successes and failures to show students and practitioners how best to negotiate the world of print, online publication, and oral presentation.

Joseph E. Harmon is a senior editor/writer at Argonne National Laboratory. Alan G. Gross is a professor in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of Minnesota. They are coauthors of The Scientific Literature: A Guided Tour, alsopublished by the University of Chicago Press.

“The Craft of Scientific Communication demonstrates quite powerfully that no scientist can survive professionally without writing well. Writing well, according to Gross and Harmon, is less a matter of following formulas and templates than it is a creative process of strategic decision-making based on the writer’s purpose and intended audience. This book enters a crowded room of ‘how to’ books for scientific authors but emerges as a unique contribution due to the authors’ extensive research of scientific communication that provides the intellectual history and social functions of the very features of good writing that scientific authors must master.”

“Harmon and Gross distill key lessons of scientific composition from exemplar articles. By parsing both overall structures and individual sentences, they show us the relationship between scientific rhetoric and scientific thinking. Exercises allow the reader to try out those lessons and internalize the ideas. Harmon and Gross’s clear guidelines and checklists will help scientists focus on the key concepts they need to build their own arguments. The suggestions they give will help scientific authors achieve their scientific goals.”