Build Your Technical and Scientific Writing Skills

07-Sep-2010 When: Thursday, September 23 - Friday, September 24, 2010

Time: 9:000am - 3:30pm (Registration 8:30am SHARP)

Where: UBC Robson Square, 800 Robson Street

Room: C100

Make an impact with your scientific and technical writing skills! Aimed at those with scientific and technical backgrounds, join MITACS Step for this two-day, hands-on writing workshop! From structure and grammar, to impact – get on-site expert feedback and a chance to work on a current, future, or past piece of your writing and get exposure to many samples of writing, from outstanding to atrocious. We look forward to seeing you there!

Learning Outcomes

Day 1 - Overview of the Writing Process
The first session of the writing workshop will discuss issues related to the overall writing process:

• common pitfalls, dealing with procrastination, staying motivated;
• the importance of the writing process (inventing, drafting, editing, and revising);
• audience analysis, understanding purpose, tone, and genres;
• effectively organizing documents and using standard forms (i.e., theses, journal papers, poster presentation, other reports);
• persuasive and informative writing;
• aspects of technical reports (i.e., abstracts, introductions, results, and conclusions).

Day 2 - Revising Strategies
The second session of the writing workshop will focus on effective editing techniques and incorporating graphics into technical writing:

• principles of punctuation;
• revising sentences for order (sentence structure, ordering ideas);
• revising sentences for clarity (avoiding general language, vague this subjects, noun strings, and prepositional phrases);
• revising sentences for conciseness (importance of descriptive verbs, avoiding empty sentence openers);
• revising for connection (structuring paragraphs, transitions between sentences);
• effective use of graphics (appropriate types of graphs, proper use of colour and layout, incorporating graphics into text).
• each other, to experience the development of a strong team, and to develop a model of the culture that they will want to create in their projects.

Speaker: Michael Sjoerdsma, School of Engineering Science, Simon Fraser University

For more information, click here

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