Scientific Writing
Scientific Writing: Putting Why before How
In this workshop publishing scientists develop a more impartial and 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.
Did you know that this workshop can be part-funded by FUNDAE? Find out more
Workshop Summary
Title: Scientific Writing – Putting Why before How
Target audience: PhD students (3rd/4th year) and Postdocs
Format: In-person and Online (in three half-day sessions)
This workshop made me love writing again
Workshop Goals
The goal of this workshop is to help publishing scientists 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?
Participants 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, we will explore some common problems of language construction that make scientists’ writing unclear, and why we are prone to these problems; we will practice some intuitive editing tools to address them.
Furthermore, we will explore how AI tools can be used to support our writing.
Workshop Content
- Five stages of Publishing
- Who is my reader?
- Creating an Expectation: Destination and Roadmap
- Building structure and connectivity: Guide Layer
- From scientific report to a scientific argument: Sentence Outline
- Writing for Readability – words, sentences, and paragraphs
- Using AI in Scientific Writing
Workshop Style
This is an interactive workshop with extensive elements of partner work, exercises, group discussion. We use innovative training methods and proven didactic techniques, and place special emphasis on sharing and learning from the participants’ own expertise and experience. To increase impact and applicability, we work with real-life cases from the participants whenever possible. We may ask participants to reserve time for individual preparatory work before the workshop
Our Trainers
All our trainers are scientists with many years of experience as researchers and scientific communicators. Please refer to our teams page to have a more detailed look at the trainers.
Comments from Past Participants and Organisers
This workshop made me love writing again
The workshop was very well structured, providing clear tools and guidelines that I can always look to while writing. Thank you!
The workshop was very hands-on and offered a lot of useful tools that I will incorporate in my writing process