Scientific Writing Workshops

This summer, Graduate Assistant Director Steven Amador had the extreme pleasure of leading a Scientific Writing Workshop for Dr. Stacey Meardon and her science students at ECU. With a background in science and education, Amador enjoys leveraging his skillset for the undergraduate scientific writers at ECU. Building off a previous workshop made by Dr. Caswell and his own extensive experience with scientific writing instruction, Amador overhauled his presentation from last summer. His goal was to reduce speaking time and increase attendee interaction through gamification. The revision was successful on both fronts. 

While the focus of the workshop remained the same—precision, clarity, and objectivity—the workshop was hosted over two 90-minute sessions. This allowed students significantly more time to unpack and apply the concepts to the workshop activities. The workshop starts with an introduction to IMRAD format, and quickly moves to workshop attendees unknowingly performing organizational rhetorical move analysis (at the abstract level) before the concept is introduced to them.  

The workshop then switches gears to directly address the meta-grammars of academese (precision, clarity, and objectivity) valued in science writing. These real world but decontextualized examples include but are not limited to: word choice, figurative language, level of detail, quantification, embedded or hidden verbs, cohesion and coherence, sentence structure, fuzzy qualifiers, tautology, passive structures, hedging, and inclusivity. 

According to Amador, there is an extreme dearth of scientific writing textbooks that significantly address inclusivity, DEI, and linguistic justice. In his presentation, he worked to pull examples of how to do inclusive language in science writing. To respond to the field’s call for using case studies in Technical Professional Communication (TPC) instruction, Amador hopes to update the workshop continually to contextualize (specifically) inclusivity examples. There are many science writing and TPC textbooks that base their instruction in case study form; but he is trying specifically to expand on inclusivity and DEI in science writing instruction.  

Please don’t hesitate to reach out to the UWC if you are interested in deepening your understanding of scientific or any other kinds of writing. The UWC welcomes instructor requests for workshops on almost any writing process/theme in any discipline. Please fill out this Google form for class workshop requests.