Writing-Intensive Courses: A Good Idea

Greetings again. And special wishes to readers (for example, in China and Vietnam) who are celebrating the start of the Year of the Dragon.

In Chinese culture, the dragon is a symbol of good luck. It also represents power, strength, and excellence. Sounds like a good year for research writing!

I hope this semester will be a good one for writing—including for students here at Texas A&M University who are taking the course Biology of Mammalian Cells and Tissues.

What? A good writing semester for students in a science course? How can that be?

Let me explain. At Texas A&M and some other universities, undergraduate students take some writing-intensive courses in their major fields of study. These courses include assignments in which students write about the subject matter.

The students in these courses keep receiving feedback, so they can keep improving their writing. They also receive some teaching about how to write in their field.

For some of this teaching, each year the professor for Biology of Mammalian Cells and Tissues has me give a guest lecture. The lecture is titled “Scientific Writing: 10 Basics”.

The professor says that the students find this lecture helpful both for this course and for other courses. I hope that, in keeping with the purpose of writing-intensive courses, they also find it helpful in their careers.

More information about writing-intensive (“W”) and communication-intensive (“C”) courses at Texas A&M is available online. Descriptions of such courses also are posted.

Wishing everyone an excellent Year of the Dragon! —Barbara