Pre-writing will help you get it right

"On my list of maladaptive practices that make writing harder, Not Outlining is pretty high…Get your thoughts in order before you try to communicate them to the world of science." (Silva 2007, 71)

Scientists need to organize their thoughts before they ask a native-speaker or an editing service to help them with their English grammar and usage. If the ideas in a scientific paper are disorganized or disconnected, the paper can be rejected or returned for revision because it is too difficult for the editor or reviewers to understand, even though there are few or no grammar errors.

To help organize and connect their ideas, almost all good writers do some kind of pre-writing that helps them to create, record and organize ideas. Pre-writing is especially important to prepare yourself to write in a second language, or to make sure that your ideas will be understood after translation. If the micro-scale aspects (vocabulary, grammar, etc.) of your writing are weak, you can compensate for this by strengthening the macro-scale aspects (organization and the connections between ideas).

Pre-writing practices vary from writer to writer, and the same writer may use different pre-writing practices for different pieces of writing. However, most researchers who are good writers find some or all of the following pre-writing activities to be useful (Woodford 1968, 10-12, 18-22; Booth, Colomb and Williams 2003, 49-52, 187-8; Schultz 2009, 56-7):

1. Write down a clear statement of the research question that motivated the study and the answer to that question. (To make your writing clearer and more precise, a research question is better than a research goal or aim – after all, most studies can be said to have the following goal: "The aim of this study was to take samples and study them.") 
2. Prepare preliminary tables and figures. Use these visuals to help you organize your thoughts.
3. Write down all your ideas for each section of the paper. At this point, the idea is just to capture all your ideas, not to organize or evaluate them. It is often helpful to do this as quickly as possible by making short notes. Do not worry about grammar, correctness, or even about writing full sentences. This is often called "brainstorming".
4. Go back and reread what was written in step three. Evaluate your ideas, and decide which ones you are going to include in the paper. Then organize those ideas by making an outline. (My outline for this blog post is below. These ideas were scattered through the notes that I made for several blog posts. As you can see, my outline is quite simple, but by taking one minute to write it, I saved many minutes of wandering words and rewriting. You can also see that I changed some things when I was writing. An outline will help to guide your thoughts, but you will discover new and better ideas when you are writing.)

MY OUTLINE FOR THIS BLOG POST
quote
4 steps
    ? (we took samples & studied them)
    tables & figures
    loose plan
    tight plan
REFERENCES
Booth, Wayne C., Gregory G. Colomb, and Joseph M. Williams. The craft of research. University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Schultz, David M. Eloquent Science: A practical guide to becoming a better writer, speaker & atmospheric scientist. American Meteorological Society, 2009.
Silva, Paul J. How to Write a Lot: A Practical Guide to Productive Academic Writing. American Psychological Association, 2007.
Woodford, F. Peter, editor. Scientific Writing For Graduate Students: A manual on the teaching of scientific writing. The Rockefeller University Press, 1968.