I love TQTs!

 

 

 

 

How I teach writing

As a teacher of scientific writing, my biggest asset may be the sheer depth and variety of my writing, editing, and reviewing experience. I draw on this experience to present students with vivid real-life examples that they often relish. In particular, they are fascinated by stories from the trenches of peer review, which convey that science includes much more stochasticity and subjectivity than they would have guessed.

Aside from being a source of anecdotes, though, this professional experience has taught me several lessons that translate directly into teaching strategies, as summarized below.

Writing is a sport

Communication skills are developed via regular “drills” that target specific tasks, as well as more holistic “put it all together” assignments. The implications for teaching are clear: if I want my students to write well, for example, I should explicitly define the individual tasks necessary for good writing and ensure that my students practice these tasks regularly, both in isolation and in the context of larger assignments.

I like these “skills drills” in part because they make good communication less mysterious. When students edit a paragraph with one particular task in mind – for example, Strunk & White’s “omit needless words” – they are often impressed by the dramatic improvements that result from this one alteration. My other favorite drills include rating passages for consistency with readers’ expectations (G.D. Gopen & J.A. Swan, American Scientist 78: 550-8, 1990) and reverse-outlining passages as a means of assessing organization.

Good writing addresses a specific audience for a specific purpose

It has been said that composition instructors’ overemphasis of the thesis-driven five-paragraph essay leads to “organized pieces of writing that have no real reason to exist” (A.R. Duxbury, English Journal 97(4); 16-18, 2008).

I first became aware of the problem of purposeless writing as a 13-year-old in a summer composition class. My satire of “Miami Vice” aimed for humor, but fell flat in part because it had no particular point of view. Ever since, I have tried to tailor my writing to the audience and purpose at hand, and, naturally, I urge my students to do likewise.

My paper assignments ask students to adopt specific roles and to write from those specific perspectives. Ideally, the assignments’ scenarios correspond to authentic professional situations while acknowledging the students’ inexperience. For example, when my students review a paper as for a scientific journal, they assess the paper’s rhetoric and evidence, as professional reviewers do, but are not expected to spot flaws in the implementation of methods that they have never performed.

Good writing is rooted in disciplinary knowledge and conventions

When writing is taught as a general process not connected to any particular field, students miss a golden opportunity to write and speak about the content most relevant to their present and future. A generic writing course will not teach students how to present experimental data, yet this is arguably the most important type of writing that STEM students can possibly do. Moreover, some genres of writing discourage certain practices, such as the repetitive use of a given word, which are encouraged in scientific communication. Thus, scientific writing is not simply a matter of applying general writing principles to scientific topics; it requires an understanding of science-specific contexts.

Partly for this reason, reading and analyzing scientific articles is a critical component of learning to write them. While students may not relish wading through the details of technical pieces, they are often intrigued by the rhetoric underlying such pieces. As they see examples of how good scientific writing presents arguments, rather than unfiltered facts, they become better at crafting their own arguments.

Good writing incorporates tension

An additional lesson I learned as a young writer came from a college English professor, who once commented, “You just shut your eyes to any interpretation but the one you’ve chosen.” Having been raised on the five-paragraph essay, I hadn’t realized that acknowledgments of ambiguity might be welcome in formal writing. These days, it is clearer to me that that any good story -- even a scholarly one -- includes some sort of conflict or uncertainty.

How can I encourage students to highlight conflicting ideas when their instincts and training have often made them conflict-avoidant? A good first step is to help them find the tension in existing primary literature. The Introduction section of a research paper frequently presents the new study as a conflict between solid understanding of one process and ignorance of a related process, or as a conflict between two alternative interpretations of previous data. Once students appreciate this aspect of others’ writing, they can shoot for similar sophistication in their own compositions.

Good writing comes from experimenting within general guidelines

Good writing is more than the sum of the parts described above; it transcends its ingredients. Since compelling writing cannot be reduced to a simple formula or checklist, writers should experiment with different styles and formats. Another way of saying this is that the revision process should not be limited to correcting mistakes; rather, it should explore more drastic, disruptive transformations.

I believe strongly in this experimentation because my first drafts are little better than anyone else’s; much of my strength as a writer comes from my willingness to revise and revise and revise some more. To encourage such revisionism in my students, I provide feedback on drafts that is somewhat open-ended and speculative (e.g., “What if you started from the position that mutating a single gene is unlikely to have such dramatic effects, and that the authors must convince you otherwise?”); likewise, my grading rubrics are flexible enough to accommodate multiple solutions to a given problem. When students email me for step-by-step instructions on how to produce a 4.0 paper, I respond that the writing process is not entirely reducible to algorithms.

It’s not necessarily an answer that they want to hear ... but good writing is honest.