How?

SciWrite integrates diverse types of science writing and communication from the beginning of and throughout graduate students’ scientific training.

A key to the training model offered is grounding in rhetoric, the academic discipline devoted to the persuasive power of language that includes studies of argument, public discourse, and civic engagement. The rhetorical approach will have three distinct features: habitual writing, multiple genres, and frequent review. Graduate students will write early and often to create a habit of writing. They will practice writing across multiple genres for academic and non-academic audiences. Graduate science writers will plan and draft their writing and then enter a process of review and revision in one-on-one and small group tutorials in classrooms, online peer review forums, and a Graduate Science Writing Center. This training is achieved through workshops led by the Co-PIs; several innovative, required courses; peer review; an internship focused on science communication with an outside agency; and faculty-mentored writing projects including the traditional thesis/dissertation and journal publication of the results from their original investigations.

Workshops for cohorts of Graduate Fellows and Faculty Fellows and Mentors will provide a rhetorical foundation and serve as a basis for individual, pedagogical, and curricular change. Faculty Fellows will be guided to adjust syllabi and writing projects for their graduate courses to incorporate more writing earlier in their courses and more opportunities for review and revision. Assessment of short-term and long-term student learning outcomes, writing tool adoption by faculty, programmatic outcomes, and project-level management will determine which components will be carried into the future and can serve as a model for similar programs.