This book is designed for the beginning writer who needs rules for formal manuscripts, laboratory reports, reviews, visualization of data, grammar, usage, style, plagiarism and scientific misconduct, the publishing enterprise, speaking with the media, and posters and presentations. The idea behind this book was to provide a very readable, short guide to answer the types of questions students seem to have and to head off the errors they seem to make when they start to write lab reports or original research papers. It is not designed to cover all topics in depth, but rather to give students a basic understanding of how research papers go from sets of data to finished manuscripts. It is based on the author's experience with misunderstandings and mistakes he has observed while serving variously as a professor, journal editor, journal advisor, reviewer, and practicing scientist.