Scientific and Technical Writing for Experiential Learners and Instructors

Every writer needs a toolkit tailored to their profession or discipline. Student and instructor needs are not being met as it pertains to training and support for the development of scientific and technical writers. Here, we present a project to study and experience the scientific writing process with undergraduates in the Freshman Research Initiative (FRI, within the College of Natural Sciences), with the goals of creating a group of peer mentors who are confident writers, a group of new students who expect to write and are supported in doing so, and, finally, a collection of experiences and “lessons learned” for teaching technical writing skills to undergraduate researchers/experiential learners.

The primary goal of this project is to work with students to experience the scientific writing process and create a course-based system that provides training in scientific and technical writing to young researchers. This is a

labor-intensive process that requires mentors who are prepared to edit and iterate with students. Initially, two groups of 4-6 upperclassmen mentors will work closely with Dr. Dinkeloo as co-authors. These groups will meet weekly to write manuscripts for research that has been completed in the Bioprospecting lab, allowing for a full experience of the writing and re-writing process. These mentors will in turn help to support 35 new FRI students

as they share collective writing experiences in-class during their first semester, and transition to independent scientific writing experiences in their second. This information will be shared as lessons learned to FRI colleagues

who mentor and instruct over 2,000 undergraduates in CNS, as well as the broader community of Undergraduate Education and beyond