Scientists must write, and they must try to do it well

As scientists we are professional writers. If you are not convinced of this I will try to convince you in the first part of the talk. In the second part I'll summarise some of the lessons I have learned from looking at the references at the end of this abstract. My favourites are "The adverb is not your friend" (King -- yes, Stephen King, the horror writer), "Omit needless words" and "Make the paragraph the unit of composition" (both Strunk and White).

Stephen King, On Writing

Joshua Schimel, Writing Science 

Robert Barras, Scientists must write

W. Strunk, E. B. White, Elements of Style

Jari Saramäki, How to write a scientific paper