Scientific Diagram
The communication of ideas is an important part of our everyday lives. One of the ways that scientists communicate is to use drawings. It is important to make a scientific drawing clear, neat, and accurate.
What To Do
- Use unlined paper and a sharp pencil. You will also need a ruler and make sure you use a good quality eraser to make your corrections.
- Give yourself plenty of space. Your diagram should be at least 1/2 page in size. Even if you earthworm is small, you still want to have the space to add labels and captions to your drawing.
- Labels identify the parts of the object you are drawing. Place labels on the right your drawing unless putting them all on the one side would make your drawing cluttered. Use your ruler to draw lines to the different structures. Make sure none of your label lines cross.
- Draw only what you see and keep your drawing simple.
- Shading or colouring is not usually found on scientific drawings. If you want to indicate a darker area, you can use stippling (a series of dots).
- If you do use colours, try to be as accurate as you can. Choose ones that are as close as possible to the colour of the earthworm. The only bright blue worms you see are the candy ones found in stores.
- Label the different structures carefully. Go back to the Key Terms in the investigation if you are not sure how to spell the names of the different structures.
- Give your drawing a title. You can also include the scale of your drawing. Is the drawing of your earthworm twice as big as the real worm? Or is it the actual size of the earthworm -- the person looking at your diagram needs to know.
A good example of a scientific drawing produced by a student (from NSWAGTC):
Another example:
A good online example of how to draw a scientific diagram:
Adapted from: http://www.naturewatch.ca/english/wormwatch/resources/drawing.html
http://nswagtc.org.au/blogs/science-guru/1078-scientific-diagrams.html
