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Description - Prerequisites - Textbooks - Curriculum - Frequency - Overview - Outline - Grading
Description
Primarily: Graduate Level. Second year and beyond. Exceptions can be made for very qualified undergraduate students.
ICS 296W: ELEMENTS OF SCIENTIFIC WRITING. (4). Introduces the concepts and principles of good scientific writing, demonstrates them by examples drawn from the literature, and uses a hands-on approach to apply them to documents being written by the participants.
Description - Prerequisites - Textbooks - Curriculum - Frequency - Overview - Outline - Grading
Prerequisites
No course prerequisite. Must know English grammar and vocabulary. Must be already engaged in the writing process. Students will spend a minimum of one to two days per week writing a paper. Class limited to no more than 15 participants.
Description - Prerequisites - Textbooks - Curriculum - Frequency - Overview - Outline - Grading
Textbooks
The Elements of Style by Strunk and White Additional material used in class will be drawn from the scientific literature and from the Web. We will use also videos such as: Building Great Sentences: Exploring the Writer’s Craft by Brooks Landon, The Teaching Company.
Description - Prerequisites - Textbooks - Curriculum - Frequency - Overview - Outline - Grading
Curriculum
This course will not count towards any degree requirements. However the course is meant to fill an important gap in the ICS curriculum. Good writing and good communication skills, hence good thinking, are important for all our students and for their careers.
Description - Prerequisites - Textbooks - Curriculum - Frequency - Overview - Outline - Grading
Expected Frequency of Offering
Once a year.
Description - Prerequisites - Textbooks - Curriculum - Frequency - Overview - Outline - Grading
Course Overview and Goals
Good writing and good communication skills, hence good thinking, are important for all our students and for their careers. Writing skills can be improved considerably by learning, adopting, and systematically applying a few simple principles and techniques. The purpose of the course is to help students improve their scientific writing skills considerably by first presenting these principles and techniques and then applying them collectively and systematically, using a hands-on approach, to scientific papers and other documents being written by the participants. The skills learnt will be broadly applicable to different disciplines and different kinds of presentations and will last a lifetime.
Description - Prerequisites - Textbooks - Curriculum - Frequency - Overview - Outline - Grading
Topic Outline
Weeks 1 and 2 are used to go over the principles and techniques of good scientific writing. Weeks 3 and 4 are used to analyze articles from the scientific literature. Week 5-10 are used to apply the principles to documents being written by the participants in a hands-on fashion.
Description - Prerequisites - Textbooks - Curriculum - Frequency - Overview - Outline - Grading
Grading
Since this is a hands-on course, 50% of the grade will come from class participation. The remaining 50% will be equally distributed between homeworks and a final project based on the redaction of a scientific article.
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