Individualized training:
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Even though examples of other people's writing are used during the class to help you recognize defective writing from good writing, in the end, your writing is what counts. Our objective is that by the end of the course, your writing improves. That is why you bring to the writing course a sample of your writing, for example the last draft of your grant or manuscript to analyze during the course. The same applies to your presentation. You will get to improve your own slides, and then present them, and answer questions in a grueling Q&A..
We prefer the workshop style, which carefully balances group work and individual work. During the class, participants are encouraged to ask questions. And after the class, participants often bring tentative titles for their next grant or paper, which we help improve. At times, the training is individual, as in the one-on-one grant writing workshop over Skype. We spend time researching the grant topic prior to giving advice, so that not only the writing is improved, but also the grant idea itself.
We prefer the workshop style, which carefully balances group work and individual work. During the class, participants are encouraged to ask questions. And after the class, participants often bring tentative titles for their next grant or paper, which we help improve. At times, the training is individual, as in the one-on-one grant writing workshop over Skype. We spend time researching the grant topic prior to giving advice, so that not only the writing is improved, but also the grant idea itself.
Original tools created for this class:
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With the help of Masters IT students from the university of Joensuu in Finland, we have designed an app that will help you assess the quality of your scientific paper, and more generally your writing. After you have entered the various parts of your paper into SWAN and answered a few questions, SWAN assesses the quality of your title, abstract, introduction and structure (headings and subheadings). It even suggests ways to improve the figures. For the presentation class, we have prepared a set of plasticized cards for you to keep and refer to before your next presentation. The cards contain the main points you need to focus on when preparing and delivering your talk.
Multimodal course material:
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For the writing and presentation classes, the class comes in a book written by us and published with World Scientific Publishing. Naturally, because the field of scientific writing evolves more rapidly than successive editions of our publications, we provide additional material on USB drives or online access to our dropbox.