Tips for writing a good methods section

Following our last post on writing good Introduction and Abstract, we discussed what a good Materials and Methods section should look like.

• The golden rule to writing a good methods section is to ask yourself whether your reader could replicate your study based on just the information you provided. Sufficient information should be provided so anybody could repeat your experiment and produce similar results. The challenge is to write this as concisely as possible. You are not conducting a high school experiment, so don’t have to tell the readers that you washed your test tubes or recorded field data with a blue ball point pen!