Becoming a Successful and Effective Science Writer (For Postdocs only)

Successful papers don’t just present a nice dataset, they also tell a clear and powerful story about how nature works. They are also written in a way that is clear, direct, and engaging. In this workshop, we will “open the toolbox” to explore some of the ways you achieve each of these goals.

In the first part of the workshop we will focus on story structure, exploring the different structures we use in writing science—not the simple document format of IMRAD (Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion), but of the different ways we can organize the structure of the actual story. When do you use a front-loaded structure where you make an argument and then flesh it out vs. building to a final conclusion?

In the second part of the workshop we will focus on energizing writing, activating language, de-jargonizing it, and creating flow and power.

Dr. Joshua Schimel is a Distinguished Professor in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology at UC Santa Barbara, and former Chair of the Environmental Studies Program. His research lies at the intersection of microbial ecology and biogeochemistry, studying how soil microbial communities function and how they, in turn, regulate biogeochemical processes. His primary research areas have been the Arctic in Alaska and Greenland, and in dry Mediterranean ecosystems in California; environments that are stressed by low water availability and wetting/drying cycles. Schimel has published over 160 papers with over 18,000 citations. Schimel is an Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellow, a Fellow in the Ecological Society of America and is a Chief Editor for Soil Biology & Biochemistry. He has served on numerous federal proposal review panels (NSF, DOE, NASA, and USDA) and as Chair of the NSF Polar Programs Advisory Committee. Schimel is the author of “Writing Science: how to write papers that get cited and proposals that get funded,” published by Oxford Univesity Press.