The writing of a scientific article offers a sharp divergence from the standard essay paper familiar to most students from English class. Supporting documentation is embedded in the scientific prose, not footnoted along the bottom of each page. Instructing students in the art of scientific writing can be truly challenging. After years of stockpiling adjectives and adverbs, the writer learns that reduction is the norm and levels of modification are minimized. Along with the alteration in style and content, scientific writing supplies its own approach, a parallel process known as the scientific method. The similarity in structure of these two processes, scientific writing and the scientific method, can facilitate the understanding of each. The scientific method sets science apart from nonscience. Unlike scientific writing, the steps and general outline of the scientific method are understood by most post-elementary students and, increasingly, even among elementary school children. The scientific method has four main steps that can be repeated, namely observation, hypothesis, experimentation, and conclusions. Similarly, most scientific articles contain four major sections, generally referred to as introduction, methods, results, and discussion. The parallel structure of these two processes is strikingly similar. In this article, the steps in the scientific method are described as they relate to the documentation of this process via scientific writing. (Contains 1 table and 3 figures.)