Scientific Writing

Department:      Pathology and Medical biology, UMCG
Supervisor:       Prof. M.G. Rots, MD PhD

Designing and performing good experiments, as well as obtaining exiting data, represent first important steps towards publication in top journals. However, at least as crucial in this persuit is the interpretation and presentation of your data. In this workshop, we will discuss some do’s and don’t in writing scientific papers.

Scientific writing deals with writing texts that are unambiguously formulated: the author determines the direct and the indirect meaning. As with popular texts for a broader public, scientific writing aims to attract the attention of the reader, and to keep the attention throughout the text. Active formulation of sentences is preferred, lengthy sentences with many dependent clauses should be prohibited to keep the audience involved. If you are allowed to submit a conference abstract of maximum 250 words, aim for a strongly formulated text, even if the word count ceases at 187.

In this workshop, the participants will actively engage in two assignments. In the first one, the aim is to trigger the participants to critically evaluate the meaning of words and the scientific content of research published. In the second assignment, we will take a close look at an abstract submitted as part of a grant application. The workshop aims to provide insights in the power of words to convince the audience (or not…).