BIOL40550 Scientific Writing and Communication

Academic Year 2023/2024

The module consists of a workshop series in which students are taught the recent advances with scientific communication and writing. Effective communication skills allow scientists to share their research findings with non-scientific audiences and other members of their discipline, thereby enhancing the contribution of science to society. Such skills are also essential for securing research funding and building collaborations across disciplines.

There will be 4 workshops as detailed below:

RMarkdown (2 workshops)
Learn how to write a data report quickly and effectively with the R Markdown package, and share your results with your colleagues and the rest of the world. Learn how you can author your own R Markdown reports, and how to automate the reporting process so that you have your own reproducible reports. By the end of the interactive data analysis reporting tutorial, you will be able to generate reports straight from your R code, documenting your work — and its results — as an HTML, pdf, slideshow or Microsoft Word document.

Tidyverse (1 workshop)
In our era of big data, the ability to manipulate data quickly and efficiently is essential. This is certainly true in the biological sciences where long-running field experiments and new technologies allow us to create vast swathes of information. As part of this module we will explore the tidyverse - a collection of packages for the R software environment. These packages have a coherent, intuitive coding philosophy which allows the user to efficiently manage, manipulate and visualize big data sets. Further, by adopting the tidyverse, our code becomes much more human readable, another indispensable feature given the importance of collaboration and reproducibility in biology.
In class we will cover the packages that form the tidyverse and showcase their power by working through a ‘messy’ dataset. We will highlight the differences to base R approaches and develop an appreciation of the advantages of the tidy approach. Experience with R is desirable but not essential for this component.

Writing a press release (1 workshop)
Scientific papers are written for an audience with scientific training but there is a whole world of people who may be interested in our research and would appreciate a jargon-free description of our latest breakthroughs. Indeed, journalism provides a link for scientists to communicate their findings with the public. Here we will look at how to write press releases which we can pass on to journalists in order to broadcast our findings. We will explore the inverted pyramid approach to writing, the importance of framing, and the value of the human side of science when it comes to public outreach.
In class, we will read a published scientific paper and try to condense its findings into a succinct press release. We will compare our efforts with the actual press release that was written by a professional press officer for the study.