technical writing
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I haven’t been blogging much as I am a) recovering from the semester and b) writing technical stuff 24/7. So I am a little tapped out. As I am thinking about writing, it’s fitting that I write about writing. Perhaps I should go full-meta and write about writing about writing… For now, I give you a few technical writing
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Over the past few weeks I have been working on papers with several students in parallel, and I am again pulling my hair out and wondering if there is a way to get the writing done and the students trained without me going bald. Reporting findings in written form is an inherent part of doing science.
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In STEM fields, a graduate student works on supervised research and is part of a research group led by a professor. Learning how to write up technical papers for publication is one of the most important parts of PhD training, so the student will typically be tasked with producing the first draft of a manuscript,
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Dear colleague: Once you are a grown-ass scientist with several years of experience past your PhD — which means that among other things you are not a graduate student of mine, for whose technical writing practices I am responsible and after whom I (grudgingly) accept that it is my job to clean up prior to manuscript
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There is a small programming assignment I like to give my beginning grad students or upper-level undergrads who want to do research in my group. The assignment is a reasonably simple but quite accurate simulation of a system they all encountered during undergraduate studies. Most students never really ask themselves what the approximations are that
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Lately, I have been reviewing proposals and playing a game with myself called “Guess how many grants the PI already has based solely on flipping through the proposal to see the formatting.” The correlation is quite pronounced: people who have a reader-friendly layout are universally better funded than those who don’t. When you start reading,
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Over the past few days, I have reviewed a small mountain of student conference abstracts, as the deadlines for two conferences where we usually have a strong showing are approaching. This exercise has reminded me of some of my favorite technical writing slips. — Don’t start a sentence with an abbreviation, i.e., don’t write “Eq.
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