Becoming a Scientific Writer:
Putting Why? before How?

(online soft-skills training, 13., 14. & 15.6.2022)

The goal of this workshop is to help our ESRs develop a more impartial, analytical view of scientific writing, to better understand their readers as the focus for their scientific communication, and to make them more efficient writers and editors. Their writing will no longer be driven by a standard formula for How? to write a paper, but will be inspired by the question Why?

The fellows will develop a deeper understanding of the structure of scientific papers, with a renewed focus on the purpose of each section and the connections between them. They will gain a global framework for conceptualising the entire publishing process, how to create an expectation in the reader and then deliver on that expectation, and how to make the qualitative jump from a passive scientific account to an active scientific argument. 

Finally, they will explore some common problems of language construction that make scientists’ writing unclear, and why we are prone to these problems; they will practice some intuitive editing tools to address them.

Content

• Five stages of Publishing
• Who is my reader?
• Destination and Roadmap
• Building structure and connectivity
• From scientific report to a scientific argument
• Scientific writing in English – words, sentences, and paragraphs

Trainer: Dr. Gavin Lucas from ThePaperMill (https://www.thepapermill.eu)