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Dan Johnson created this post
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Bright Idea, or Bad Idea?
One of the ongoing challenges of teaching scientific writing is getting students out of the habit of writing a Methods section that is a list of steps they followed. This is not how most primary literature is written, but they keep doing it. Has anyone tried writing a more general protocol guide or handbook for their courses, then had students reference the protocols just like they would primary literature articles? If so, how did it go? If not, anyone have thoughts?
Part of the inspiration for this idea is the old "red books," big binders full of protocols that most molecular biology labs subscribed to in the pre-internet days. There are open-access journals that follow this model (J. of Visualized Experiments, Current Protocols in Molecular Biology, etc.) Why not use the methods write-up to do more?
Dan Johnson onto STEM Writing Resources
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STEM Writing Resources
These are materials outside of the STEM Writing Project related to teaching writing in undergraduate STEM courses (not just in biology). What does the collection include?
- Practical methods for training new writers is the main topic of posts in this resource.
- Making and interpreting arguments is at the heart of scientific writing. The collection will include evidence-based argumentation posts and resources.
- Reading literature is an important part of learning to write well, so some posts focus on reading skills.
- Data analysis and visualization is key to reporting results, so expect to see posts on graphing data, basic statistics, etc.
- Anything else that seems related to teaching scientific writing.
Know of a resource that should be in the collection? Let us know!
Dan Johnson
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