A Short Guide to Writing About Biology

This best-selling writing guide by a prominent biologist teaches students to think as biologists and to express ideas clearly and concisely through their writing. Providing students with the tools they'll need to be successful writers in college and their profession, "A Short Guide to Writing about Biology" emphasizes writing as a means to examine, evaluate, share, and refine ideas. The text teaches students how to read critically, study, evaluate and report data, and how to communicate information clearly and logically. Students are also given detailed advice on locating useful sources, interpreting the results of statistical tests, maintaining effective laboratory and field notebooks, writing effective research proposals and poster presentations, writing effective applications, and communicating information to both professional and general audiences.

Jan A. Pechenik is Professor of Biology at Tufts University, where he has been teaching and doing research since 1978. He obtained his B.A. in Zoology from Duke University and his Ph.D. in Biological Oceanography from the Graduate School of Oceanography at the University of Rhode Island. To date he has published more than a hundred papers on the development and metamorphosis of marine invertebrate animals, including snails, blue mussels, crabs, barnacles, polychaetes, bryozoans, and parasitic flatworms. Professor Pechenik has also published a successful textbook on invertebrate biology, currently in its 3rd edition, and chairs the Division of Invertebrate Zoology within the Society for Comparative and Integrative Biology (formerly the American Society of Zoologists). Committed to teaching as well as research, his highly praised book on this subject, "A"S"""hort Guide to Writing About Biology," will publish in its eighth edition in January 2012.