The following are some resources that may help you with your scientific writing. Scientific writing can be a challenge even for native writers, so don’t despair. Practice makes perfect and you have to write in order to learn to write.

Here is a short 1-page cheat sheet to help you getting started:
Writing_in_english_(1-page_for_koreans).

For chemistry students, it is worthwhile to look at the style guide of the American Institute of physics or the Americal Chemical Society. You can find a short excerpt from the AIP style guide here: AIP_Style_4thed_extract. Or directly visit the ACS website at: pubs.acs.org/styleguide.

Use dictionaries to find the right words (e.g.: www.merriam-webster.com (US-English), www.oxforddictionaries.com (British-English)). Use a spell checker to avoid unnecessary spelling mistakes.

If you are a non-native speaker, please make an extra effort to check your articles. Here is a very short primer about article placement in the English language:

• “a” (also: “one”): Indefinite article. Always use when referring to one object that the reader does not yet know about.
• “the” (also: “that”, “this”): Definite article. Always use when referring to one or multiple objects that the reader already knows about.
• “” (no article): Plural indefinite article for objects that the reader did not yet know about, or for general statements about objects.

E.g.: I teach in a University. (You didn’t know about it yet.) The University is new. (I talk about the same University, so you already know about it.) I like a University. (Now I talk about a different University that you don’t know about.) Universities are cool. (I make a general statement about all Universities.)

And finally, read English books or English newspapers to improve your English style and vocabulary. There are lots of exciting English texts out there and reading is the easiest way to learn!

Here is some specific feedback for the 2016 Lab course reports: report_feedback.

• The introduction slides for the lab course can be found here: Intro
• Vibrational absorption frequencies for common chemical groups are listed in the IR_correlation_table.
• Relevant vibrational Raman reference spectra [1] are summarized in this document: Literature Raman spectra.
• You can ask questions to the teaching assistant 이종찬 (leejoy0977@gmail.com).

[1] SDBSWeb : http://sdbs.db.aist.go.jp (National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Aug. 9, 2016)

This is history! By fiddling around with the Klinger motion controller we brought over from the laboratory in Berlin, I figuered out that it is quite a challange to run and control it with our measurement computers. (more…)

Observing rotational coherences in time allows you to determine rotational constants of molecules with high accuracy. But what does high accuracy mean? Indeed, you can only be as accurate as the measurement you performed. If your measurement is sensitive to enviromental conditions, you have to also measure these conditions precisely. (more…)

This is amazing! Within one year 6600 visitors visited our page. Assuming that 85% are bots, the number of human visitors still sums up to around 1000 people that are interested in what we are doing. 🙂 In order to keep you up to date, we are still struggling with our Coherent® LIBRA systems. 🙁