On scientific writing

In science, communication, both oral and written, is a critical skill. I know the stereotypical scientist is some extremely awkward asocial geek or nerd (at least when they aren't maniacally evil). Of course this is not true¹. Although an argument can be made that scientists are not necessarily good at communicating with the general public, to be a successful scientist you need to be able to discuss your work and the work of others and to write papers/grants/etc effectively. Unfortunately scientific communication is skill that is often developed on the fly.

¹OK, Ill admit physicists really are awkward.

I argue that we should be teaching scientific writing early, at the undergraduate level. But unfortunately for undergraduate students, at least in the life sciences, a few stock lab reports, the occasional 10-20 page essay, and maybe a research project thesis represents their 4 year scientific writing experience. More problematic however is that there often little instruction given to the writing apart from the different sections that you need to include (abstract, introduction, etc.). As instructors, we rely on the English department, at best, or high schools, at worst, to teach students how to write. This generally leads to failure. The failure is not due to poor instruction by the English department, but due to the fact that the mission of the English department is not to teach scientific communication. The College of Biological Sciences (CBS) wants to rectify this issue by promoting student writing at the undergraduate level and providing some cohesion in writing instruction throughout the college.

CBS tries to get faculty cohesion in writing instruction.

To date I have been involved in a number of meetings (we're good at that) with colleagues to define the goals for CBS student writing. In part, we developed a list of the characteristics of science writing, realizing that a review paper and lab report have some different characteristics. Over the last two years, I have been introducing more writing and writing instruction into my fall semester course and I am continuing that trend this year. So with a few years of experience plus a small number of 'student writing' focused meetings under my belt, I will be posting (yet another probably never finishing) series regarding science writing.

This was supposed to be the first post in that series, but my introduction got so long the point was going to be buried. So I decided to make this an introductory post, another will follow shortly.