This course is an experiment. I have advised many people -- undergraduates, Masters and PhD candidates, postdoctoral fellows, and others -- on their writing. I've developed some insights about technical writing over time, that not only agree with some of the literature on technical writing, they also seem to help people write better. This course is my attempt to better understand and communicate some of these insights.

I hope to spend a part of each lecture talking about these ideas, and a part of each lecture in "workshop", where we do some writing and look at others' writing, with these ideas (and undoubtedly others) in mind.

For this course, it is important that you have some real writing project that you are working on: there is no better way to improve your skills than to practice them on something that matters. We will touch on other topics such as grammar, usage & style, formatting and outlining, tables & graphs, oral presentations & posters, referee reports, grantwriting, ways of approaching writing and writing tasks, etc., as time, need, & interest permits, but the main focus will be on producing clear, readable, informative technical writing that serves you and serves the reader.

A big part of this course will be actually writing, and reading each others' writing. That is why we are using this Canvas course management system; it has some special tools for peer evaluation, and it seems less klunky than Blackboard.

Before we meet for the first time on Tuesday Jan 12, please go to the Discussion section here, and answer the questions posed in the first thread there (please post before 2:00pm; our class meets at 3pm in WEH 4709.

 

I'm looking forward to the course!

all best,

-BJ