Events
TRAINING SUMMARY
Title: Becoming a Scientific Writer: Putting Why? before How?
Target audience: Researchers from 2nd year PhD onward at CINBIO
Duration: Two full days
No. participants: 16
Format: In person at CINBIO Audiovisual Room, Vigo
Dates: June 29 & 30, 2022 (Day 29: 11.30-19.30, Day 30: 09.30-17.30)
Trainer(s): Dr Gavin Lucas
*Pause for coffee and lunch included both days
WORKSHOP GOAL
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.
WORKSHOP 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
TRAINING METHODS
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.
TRAINERS
Dr Gavin Lucas PhD is director of ThePaperMill, and a scientist with 13 years of experience as a biomedical researcher, and 14 years of experience as an academic author’s editor, consultant and trainer. In addition to his own solid track-record as a publishing scientist on national, European and international research projects, as an academic author’s editor and consultant, he has helped plan, critique, and polish over 500 original scientific articles for dozens of institutes in diverse fields, as well as dozens of H2020 and Horizon Europe
proposals. He also has extensive experience as a trainer in scientific writing and other transferable skills for researchers, and provides consultancy on training and scientific productivity at numerous academic institutes, public agencies, charitable foundations, and private companies.
