Writing workshop: A brief blitz of scientific writing tips

Workshop information

Instructor: Professor Dionne M. Aleman ()

Workshop documents:
Slides
Sample paragraph thesis outline
Sample problem statement to analyze

What is this workshop about?

The long and sometimes painful process of writing a manuscript often catches grad student researchers by surprise. You think you have done great research, but your advisor has scratched red over every paragraph in your manuscript. You think you have made all the corrections requested by your advisor, but the iterations seem neverending. You think you have finished with your research, but you can't graduate until you have finished writing up your results and have submitted your finalized manuscript to a peer-reviewed journal. This workshop will speed up the manuscript process from start to finish by helping you understand what makes a manuscript good (it's not the quality of your research!) and by showing you several tips and tricks to streamline the number of iterations between you and your advisor (or journal reviewers).

This workshop is NOT about spelling, grammar, or sophisticated writing techniques accessible only to fluent or native English speakers. Although several grammatical pitfalls will be illustrated, they will be presented in the context of decreasing review cycles. This two-hour workshop is presentation and discussion based; very little actual writing will be done, though we will do analysis of sample texts. Writers at any stage of experience and comfort are welcome.