Earth Science

This remark is highly relevant to scientific writing. But how to write whatever "it" is can be a problem, since "it" can take many forms.

Observation: a bold statement

• If you visit a plate boundary, you will find earthquakes; volcanoes; mountains; long, narrow rifts; folding; and faulting. There are three basic types of plate boundary: divergent boundaries; convergent boundaries; and transform-fault boundaries.
• The creature had claws.
  

Interpretation: what the facts or events suggest

• Plates cover the globe, so, unless our planet is expanding, to conserve Earth's surface area plates separating in one place must converge somewhere else.
• The creature may have used the claws to climb trees.
  

Evidence:

• Not all plates are major plates, for example, the tiny Juan de Fuca Plate, which is a piece of oceanic lithosphere trapped between the giant Pacific and North American plates; and the Anatolian Plate, which includes much of Turkey.
• Fossils indicate that the creature had claws.
  
  

 

Acknowledgement: I have taken sentences and examples from Grotzinger et al., 2007, Understanding Earth, New York, W. H. Freeman and Company.