Environment Case

The overall scientific credibility, sufficiency and relevance of any scientific paper must be accurately determined as it is these scientific papers that many scientists (and upcoming scientists) use as a channel to communicate their information and findings as well as investigate other scientists work. Formality in any scientific paper ensures that its use will be viable to others who wish to use the paper as a reference. It is therefore vital a scientific review is done in order to ensure that the information shared is represented in a credible, yet formal manner. Upon reading the required article “Choice of tree species for planting in green zones of towns in Tanzania” a detailed review has been carried out, evaluating its formality so to assess its overall scientific credibility, sufficiency and its relevance.

The general focus of the paper deals with the concept of urban forestry which has been introduced as a result from the rapid growth of urbanisation. Creating these ‘green zones’, namely increasing the amount of vegetation in ‘concrete’, urban areas, is a fairly new concept and is vital especially in countries like Tanzania where rapid urbanisation has resulted in little to almost no vegetation. The fact that Tanzania’s climate has major effects on many tree species, also indicates that the focus on finding appropriate tree species for these specific ‘green zones’ is extremely necessary. However, there are a number of issues with the article and for that reason will be discussed in the following review.

Firstly, the general writing style, choice of words and spelling is quite poor. Simple mistakes such as miss spelling commonly used words like ‘collecting’ or ‘spread’ as well as miss use of some words, for example ‘focused group’ instead of ‘focus group’ were present throughout the paper. Switching between the present and past tense is another factor that affects this articles formality, making it difficult to identify what is happening when. An example of switching tenses can be seen in the following sentences which state; “the study was a cross was a cross-sectional one and the data were collected” which shows past tense and “Generated data call for integration” displaying the present. The more preferable tense when writing up a scientific paper is the past tense and it is strongly advised that only one tense is used throughout the whole paper. The way in which the sentences have been structured (i.e. punctuation) combined with poor spelling and misuse of the right word here and there makes it much more difficult to read and interpret. “…household heads mentioned that some of their established trees had ever been cut by TANESCO due to its interferences to overhead electrical wires…” gives an example of this misinterpretation and even so miss communication as it sounds awfully confusing as to what actually happened with TANESCO and the trees. The presence of too many