I saw a good question on another site, and it piqued my interest: how does one write a formal critique? How does one write a science paper?

Usually a science paper is submitted to a scientific Journal like Cell or Nature. It usually follows a certain format with an abstract, methods, discussion, introduction and a results section. Researchers submit most of the scientific papers. If you can't get your papers published in a regular scientific journal then you can always create your own journal-writers do it all the time.

 

 

That's the journal part of scientific writing. There are other kinds of scientific papers written. Alot of these are not written by researchers, but instead they are written by a range of different people interested in science. These papers do not follow the strict format of a journal article and are often written for the layman. These papers are published like any other piece: they are published in magazines (Scientific American), published on line, published in a book, etc.

Ahh, cool, but what is a formal critique?

A formal critique is the result of critical analysis of a written piece of work. It it not necessarily criticism; it acknowledges both the strengths and the weaknesses of the work, usually by comparing it with other, related works.