By comparing the results from 1989 and 1990, some gains among students exposed to the Writing Across the Curriculum program can be seen. This research team feels that these findings are especially interesting in terms of assessment because they suggest a relationship between general writing experience and the development of specific kinds of disciplinary thinking, which may be measured through writing tasks. Although Kostidis implied that the writing of scientific essays was not essential to the curriculum in the IU Dental School, essay writing is very important to dentistry for other reasons. One such reason is to share new ideas and results from experiments with other dentists. There are several important factors that go into the writing of a successful essay for Dentistry.
Dental essays follow the basic guidelines of any scientific essay.
According to Louise Ciciriello, there are four essential aspects of a scientific essay. The first is scientific content, which must be accurate and relevant to the topic. Comprehensiveness and coherence of the scientific content are also very important. The second important aspect is effectiveness of the communication, meaning the grammar, spelling, punctuation, neatness, and clarity. To ensure one writes clearly, Ciciriello suggests using at first short sentences and improving the expression and joining sentences together later.