<p>I have recently been accepted to my first college of choice. I am leaning toward a science major. Most likely it will be Chemistry or Biology. One of my concerns is about writing essays. I am not a great writer;however, I am taking ACP English and have an "A." What I am wandering is, how much paper writing is there in these kinds of majors other than lab reports?</p>
<p>Other than lab reports, not much outside of the required core curriculum, which includes English I and your choice of English II (heavy research) or Technical Writing. In addition, your mandatory core Political Science, US History and Social and Behavioral Science classes will likely involve writing.</p>
<p>It’s going to vary some from school to school, but the writing components in most ‘hard’ science majors isn’t really that heavy. You’ll have to take some GenEd college level composition, but beyond that it really just depends on the classes you take.</p>
<p>Some of the GenEd classes will have heavier writing components. History classes tend to have a lot of writing, as do some other classes like psychology and philosophy. The sociology and anthropology classes I’ve taken both had essay based exam structures, usually coming down to about 4-6 pages worth of writing on an exam. </p>
<p>As far as the science classes go though, they aren’t real writing heavy outside of lab reports. Honors sections of courses often involve a cumulative research project or something of that nature that will involve a research paper. I’m in honors sections of both physics and calculus right now, and both involve 10-15 page research papers. I’m also in an honors section of chemistry, but the honors portion of that is basically all lab based. I’ve gotta write up lab reports too, but those are usually pretty brief and more to the point.</p>
<p>The lab reports will get more elaborate as you get to higher level courses. You will take at least one course that is a writing in the discipline where your lab report will be almost like a dissertation or publishable paper. For myself that was physcial chemistry laboratory. We had about 8 lab reports 1 every 2 weeks that averaged 20 pages or so long. I remeber packing the fridge with energy drinks the night before because that was an all nighter. It usually took me most of the two weeks to research and grasp the concepts behind the lab and finally write them down the last night.</p>
<p>The type of writing you do as a science major is very different from the more traditional essays you are probably used to writing. It is more technical and focused on getting across information in the form of a lab report or a scientific paper and is generally very content focused, vs style (though it does still have to be intelligible).</p>