Abstract
Scientific writing is a cornerstone of professional chemistry, yet undergraduate and graduate students frequently struggle with the transition from general academic writing to technical, discipline-specific communication. This review synthesizes research on common writing challenges in chemistry education, including difficulties with laboratory report structure, results and discussion sections, hypothesis formulation, data presentation, chemistry-specific conventions, literature use, and the linguistic barriers experienced by English learners as a second language. The paper also evaluates effective pedagogical strategies, including scaffolded assignments, journal-style writing, writing-to-learn activities, calibrated and double-blind peer review, interactive video workshops, information-literacy instruction, and graduate-level review article writing. The literature shows that student writing improves most effectively when instruction is explicit, repeated, discipline-specific, and integrated across the curriculum rather than isolated within a single course. A practical departmental framework is proposed to support chemistry students from introductory laboratory reports to advanced manuscript-style writing. Overall, scientific writing should be treated not only as a communication skill but also as a mechanism for developing chemical reasoning, professional identity, and participation in the scientific community.