How to make clear a scientific paper…

• Start with some background information
• Explain the principal activity of the study and its scope
• Expose some information about the methodology of the study
• Show the most important results
• Write a statement of conclusion or recommendation

The main problem is that the examples we saw didn’t follow what we’ve explained before : this is a bit strange, but scientific abstracts are not easy to understand because they are too messy. For example, in paper called “ Ohmic and Schottky nanocontacts on ZnO nanorods ”, the abstract was exposing too much information about the methodoloy, with no introduction telling us some background information.

We did some vocabulary too, when reading a paper about “ Deformation of microcapsules in 3D shear flows ”, in micro flows : a shear flow is a ‘cisaillement’ in french, a droplet is the little water sphere when it rains, and the term unbounded means you are far away from the canal limits.

The most interesting thing we did (in my point) during the last lesson was to understand some english expressions. They are so strange and so funny ! Here are some examples i liked :

• “ I’ve just had forty winks ” means you don’t want to sleep (where is the link ?)
• “ I’ve let the cat out of the bag ” means you’ve revealed a secret !
• “ I’ve got butterflies in my stomach ” means you’re nervous… Poor butterflies !
• “ I’ve lost my tongue ” means you’re speechless… Why a tongue ?

Think about it :)

Thank you !