Word choices

Another aspect of convincing your readers of your modelling results, is to use an appropriate tone in your report. You are not having a friendly chat conversation. You are writing a scientific report, and the words you use, should be chosen accordingly.

In this section, we will focus on keeping your tone formal and objective.  These concepts overlap significantly, but each has its own focus.

Objective language

The goal of a scientific report is to answer a scientific question, by means of a scientific argument. The feelings, opinions or experiences of its authors are irrelevant to this. This is why the language used in the report should be objective: an impersonal style of writing. To achieve this style, focus on the following aspects:

• Avoid the words “I” or “you” in the text. This places focus on the author or reader rather than the results. Using “we” is considered slightly better, but should still be avoided when possible.
  Instead, you can try to shift the subject of the sentence to another word. Perhaps one of the other nouns can serve as a subject (often creating a passive sentence). Other options use the words “it” or “there” as subjects, or use “this research”. The closest option to the subjective “I / you / we” is the use of “one”.Subjective: We can conduct an experiment to test this hypothesis.

  Objective alternatives:
  This hypothesis can be tested in the following experiment.
  The following experiment can be conducted to test this hypothesis.
  It is possible to test this hypothesis using an experiment.
  There is an experiment that can test this hypothesis.
  One can conduct an experiment to test this hypothesis.

• Avoid words reflecting opinions, experiences or feelings. Some first examples of subjective words are: beautiful, terrible, incredible. Other words that can create a subjective impression are vague or extreme quantifiers: huge, enormous, kind of, a bit, very much, teeny tiny.
• And finally, you should avoid explicitly giving opinions or talking about feelings in a scientific report. Only in a paragraph on motivations (in the introduction) might this be relevant.