For Instructors

We want SWP Writing Guide to be more than a student resource. We also want it to be an evolving resource for biology instructors who teach scientific writing to undergraduates, or who supervise teaching assistants who do. Through this Guide we hope to introduce non-specialist STEM writing instructors to evidence-based principles and practices that they might not know about.

When we began studying student writing through an educational research lens, we soon learned that the Writing Across the Curriculum/Writing in the Disciplines (WAC/WID) community has produced a large body of evidence over the last 20-25 years about what the most effective writing instructional practices are. We also found that many common scientific writing instructional practices do not bear up to close scrutiny, and may actually be counter-productive in helping students develop the necessary skills. These are two examples.

Over-Editing. Many instructors will make a dozen or more very specific comments per page on student reports, or routinely copy-edit individual sentences. Yet students often ignore many of these corrections. Published WAC/WID studies have shown that the average college student learning a new writing style:

• can only process and internalize 3-5 substantive comments per written page;
• treats all comments as having equal weight; and
• is very likely to make the simplest corrections first, assuming these changes benefit the final grade as much as more challenging corrections do.

Given this behavior pattern, instructors can help students grow as writers faster if they focus attention on correcting global and structural flaws before tackling smaller errors. So long as larger flaws remain, any formatting that can be corrected by copy-editing is unlikely to improve the overall communicative quality of the work. This is why we now limit the number of arbitrary rules and requirements, and encourage students to focus on the key elements of writing as a means of communication and argumentation first. It also is why we train our GTAs to limit and prioritize comments.

The form of comments is just as important. Specific, directive corrections and copy editing show a student how to fix a specific writing error but do not help them develop a mental model for how to correct related (though not identical) errors in the future. Coaching students with a combination of leading questions and more general suggestions helps them learn how to reflect on their work and correct it themselves.

Too Many Random Rules. A complaint we hear routinely from students is that every teacher has different rules and requirements for their scientific writing assignments. We and others have found that excessively detailed or strict rules actually get in the way of learning to write like a scientist. Very often these differences reflect the preferred disciplinary conventions of the course topic or instructor rather than any pedagogical strategy.

Citation formats are an excellent example of this problem. Mastering the minutiae of a particular citation format does not help a student learn to write well. It is more important that a student understands HOW and WHY we use citations. This is why we recommend students learn to use a reference manager like Zotero or Mendelay; these programs let students focus on supporting their arguments well rather than whether journal names (but not book names) end with a semi-colon or a comma.

In this Guide we have tried to avoid repeating rules and requirements that are not essential to learning to write well. We also point out when there may be differences in opinion. When instructors modify this guide to fit their local audience, we urge them to think very carefully about the pedagogical value of every spcific rule or requirement.

We know from audience responses in professional presentations that some STEM writing instructors will disagree strongly with our approach. We stand by it because there is ample external evidence supporting it, and we have evaluated it thoroughly with our own students. That said we know there will always be room to improve. We encourage healthy debate and discussion, and hope others will share their experiences back with us.

General Organization of the Guide

Parts 1-6 of the Guide are written assuming that we are talking directly to individual undergraduate students. These sections of the Guide describe the logic and mechanics of writing a lab report in the format of a journal article that conforms to the Council of Science Editors (8e) standards, with some revisions that make writing easier for students just starting out. Optional or advanced material is marked as such.

Some pages have an Instructors’ Supplement section at the end that includes:

• Rationale summarizes the reasons, published evidence, or local data supporting a recommended practice.
• Instructional Notes are practical tips, tricks, or alternative ways to implement the methods or activities described.
• Adapting Your Guide points out items that instructors should modify so the distributed document/web pages match their local goals or requirements.
• Watch-Outs are particularly difficult or frequent problems that we or others have encountered, and any strategies we know about for working around them.

Part 7 contains resources for instructors only. Both the Instructors’ Supplements and all of Part 7 can be deleted from the students’ edition of the Guide with no loss of content for them.

Adapting the Guide For Your Students

Every group of students is different; what our students want or need to know may be different from what your students need. Rather than try to make a Guide that covers every possibility, we have released the Guide under the terms of a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license so that instructors can edit, extend or modify it to fit their particular needs and requirements.

All source files and instructions for converting the Guide to print or digital formats are available from the Stem Writing Project’s GitHub repository.

Who ARE We?

This Guide was created by the STEM Writing Project at Wake Forest University. We are STEM teachers and education researchers who want to make scientific writing a bigger part of students’ training. The STEM Writing Project is funded in part by NSF IUSE Program Award #1712423: “Improving Scientific Writing In Undergraduate STEM Classrooms: A Training Program for Students and Teaching Assistants Aided By Information Extraction Technology”.

All contents are the opinion of the project team, and are not endorsed by NSF or other supporting agency.

Except where noted, all content is licensed for reuse under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-SA 4.0

If you are interested in contributing to the public edition of Guide, or want to learn out more, contact us through the project GitHub site.