How to write and publish a scientific paper - Barbara Gastel, Robert A. Day 2022

Understanding the signals
What is scientific writing?
Some preliminaries

Scientific writing is the transmission of a clear signal to a recipient. The words of the signal should be as clear, simple, and well ordered as possible. In scientific writing, there is little need for ornamentation. Flowery literary embellishments—metaphors, similes, idiomatic expressions—are very likely to cause confusion and should seldom be used in research papers.

Science is simply too important to be communicated in anything other than words that have a certain meaning. And the meaning should be clear and certain not just to peers of the authors, but also to students just embarking on their careers, to scientists reading outside their own narrow disciplines, and especially to those readers (most readers today) whose native language is other than English.

Many kinds of writing are designed for entertainment. Scientific writing has a different purpose: to communicate new scientific findings. Scientific writing should be as clear and simple as possible.