The student writing toolkit: enhancing undergraduate teaching of scientific writing in the biological sciences

Abstract

Teaching scientific writing in biology classes is challenging for both students and instructors. This article offers and reviews several useful ‘toolkit’ items that improve student writing. These include sentence and paper-length templates, funnelling and compartmentalisation, and preparing compendiums of corrections. In addition, students benefit from reviewing scientific figures and learning about the verbs used in scientific papers. The approaches and exercises presented in this paper empower students in their development of a personal writing style. Often, however, the best tools are those that students develop with each other, a method of tool building addressed in this article.

Keywords:

• biological writing
• undergraduates
• teaching approaches
• class exercises
• scientific writing

Acknowledgements

Students at The University of Texas-Pan American (UTPA) are appreciated for the wealth of examples they provide, which help us to teach writing. We would like to thank several anonymous reviewers and Zen Faulkes (UTPA) who helped to improve the manuscript with their edits. Figure 2 is reprinted with permission from John Wiley & Sons, © 2009, Royal Statistical Society