New Summer Online Graduate Course on Grant Writing and Article Writing

This summer, Adam R. Pope in the Department of English will be offering a newly revised version of ENGL 5533 Technical Writing Praxis that allows students to refresh their writing and grammar skills while choosing to focus in either building their skills as grant writers or as the authors of scientific/research manuscripts. The course, offered online during the 10-week summer term, is open to all graduate students at the university. 

As Pope explains, though the course is part of the Graduate Certificate in Technical Writing and User Experience Design, it is desgined to help any student looking to build their grantwriting and article writing skills.

"A lot of graduate students, myself included," noted Pope, "enter into a master's or doctoral program not having had any intensive writing instruction that prepared them to excel in documenting research and research projects. This course is designed to help those students who recognize they need to work on building their writing and formatting skills now rather than later." 

Though the blistering pace of AI-driven writing tools might make some authors feel they don't need to work on their own writing skills, Pope sees things differently: "In my mind, the success of AI in research writing says more about how little we train ourselves in research writing than anything else. Writing articles from research data is how knowledge is made. It doesn't just leap from the data table to the page. When you're forced to take a table or results from a study and turn them into meaningful claims that intersect with the existing bodies of knowledge in your field while respecting the requirements of your targeted publication venue, you're doing intellectual work. Yes, you could use AI to help you map out the structure of an article or provide you with suggestions for ordering information, but at the end of the day the hard work of taking data and turning it into text is where and how we make knowledge in research. Taking shortcuts on that process robs the writer/researcher of a chance to really think through the implications of their data. I can't see the real benefits of skipping over the step where knowledge gets made." 

Pope hopes that the course will provide students a chance to brush up on their writing skills over the summer while preparing them to contribute to the research mission of the university and advance their own careers.