This study attempted to establish an image of a science writer based on a synthesis of writing theory models and research literature on academic writing in science and other disciplines and to contrast this image with an actual prototypical image of scientists as writers of science. The synthesis was used to develop a questionnaire to assess scientists writing habits beliefs strategies and perceptions about print-based language. The questionnaire was administered to 17 scientists from science and applied science departments of a large Midwestern land grant university. Each respondent was interviewed following the completion of the questionnaire with a custom-designed semistructured protocol to elaborate probe and extend their written responses. These data were analyzed in a stepwise fashion using the questionnaire responses to establish tentative assertions about the three major foci (type of writing done criteria of good science writing writing strategies used) and the interview responses to verify these assertions. Two illustrative cases (a very experienced male physical scientist and a less experienced female applied biological scientist) were used to highlight diversity in the sample. Generally these 17 scientists are driven by the academy s priority of publishing their research results in refereed peer-reviewed journals. They write their research reports in isolation or as a member of a large research team target their writing to a few journals that they also read regularly use writing in their teaching and scholarship to inform and persuade science students and other scientists but do little border crossing into other discourse communities. The prototypical science writer found in this study did not match the image based on a synthesis of the writing literature in that these scientists perceived writing as knowledge telling not knowledge building their metacognition of written discourse was tacit and they used a narrow array of genre strategies target audiences and expectations for their writing. copy 2002 Wiley Periodicals Inc. Sci Ed86 672 ndash 692 2002 Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/sce.10042