Returning to a Grandparent and Parent of AuthorAID

Greetings again. I hope you’re doing well.

The past few days I’ve been in China, where I started teaching research writing internationally. This visit brings back many memories.

From 1983 to 1985, I taught research writing at Peking (Beijing) University Health Science Center. I was quite young then, and I taught mainly mid-career faculty members. Most of them have now retired.

A few days ago in Beijing, I had lunch with a group of these faculty members. Since the course, some of them have published many journal articles. One of them has been elected to the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Also, for a decade beginning in 1996, I coordinated the US aspect of a program to teach medical writing and editing at health science centers in China. Much of the teaching in this program was based on the courses that I had given in Beijing.

This program included an editor training program. In it, Chinese faculty members learned to edit papers that colleagues would submit to journals. They also learned to teach English-language medical writing.

Now I’m in Guangzhou for a meeting of graduates of the editor training program. Many are still editing papers, teaching medical writing, or both. Some also have been very successful in publishing their own papers and obtaining grants.

In 2007, when AuthorAID was starting, I was asked to participate because of my experience teaching research writing in China. That teaching has been the basis of the main AuthorAID workshops.

In a way, my early teaching in China was a grandparent of AuthorAID and the later program there was a parent of AuthorAID. I’m happy that my teaching in China has helped lead to research-writing instruction for researchers in many countries.

Until the next post—

Barbara