Previous Classes

Patricia Weis-Taylor has retired from CU after teaching scientific writing for 12 years in the physics department.

Now PWT provides custom instruction to teach strategies for clear, concise scientific writing. For scientists, such writing is necessary to participation in the intellectual life of their discipline. Clients choose a research topic within their discipline and work to define the research problem or question, explain research methods, and discuss results and conclusions. In addition to writing, we teach clients to design and present effective oral presentations about their research.

We view writing as a process with three stages: prewriting, writing, and rewriting. Because good writers spend 90% of their time on the prewriting and rewriting stages, we focus on techniques for these two stages in this class.

Prewriting: Students learn to use mind maps and issue trees for organizing their ideas and data prior to writing. Students define the interests and technical level of their audience and learn to write for their intended audience.

Writing: Students write and evaluate the individual sections of their research paper as separate activities. These sections will eventually be combined into the complete research paper final draft.

Rewriting: Students learn to review drafts of their own writing and those of their peers. They develop a personal Final Edit Checklist to use when rewriting drafts of their work. The Checklist summarizes strategies presented in the course and contains personal issues of grammar and style for each student to apply during the revision stage of their future papers.