Essentials of Scientific Writing: How to Write Effective Titles and Abstracts for Research Papers and Proposals is a belated entrant into a vast and crucially important area with scarce reference materials. This scarcity manifested itself as I searched what I had expected would be useful source materials for the present book. I skimmed through many textbooks on scientific writing and editing, articles on the Internet, and notes from courses on scientific writing. They all turned out to be manifestly wanting in both depth and scope. None extended beyond two pages, and most were hardly a page long, so they were largely useless for my purposes.
To the author’s knowledge, few published books treat the subjects of Titles and Abstracts in the kind of detail presented in this book. Accordingly, in developing the book, the author hoped to fill a void in the crucial area of facilitating sharing of knowledge and information from research work.
It is my hope that everyone writing scientific work will endeavor to find space for the book on their shelves and will place it within arm’s length whenever they are writing or editing the title or abstract.