On Scientific Writing workshop

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• #Career Service
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Last 20th and 25th of January, the Bachelor’s Degree in Bioinformatics and the Career Service of ESCI-UPF organized a two-session workshop on Scientific Writing. Laia Josa Culleré, Marie Curie Postdoctoral Researcher at Institute for Advanced Chemistry of Catalonia (IQAC-CSIC), conducted the course.

During the sessions, Laia Josa stressed the importance of good communication skills in science, especially good technical writing skills. As future bioinformaticians, working either in research or for private companies, our ability to solve problems and obtain results is as important as our ability to communicate those results.

The first session was about journal articles, how to structure them, how to write them and how to review them. As well as the peer-review process. The second session focused on technical writing. Laia shared with us some sentences, taken from real papers, that we had to correct. This showed us how common these mistakes are and how to avoid them.

The focus of scientific writing is to communicate as clearly and efficiently as possible. The information that these writings divulge is often complex and very specialized, that’s why it is important to have strong writing skills. In this context, this doesn’t mean just writing correct English, it also means writing within the conventions of scientific and technical writing.

It was a very useful workshop because it solved a lot of questions that make me doubt when I am writing for assignments and projects. I would strongly encourage all BDBI students, especially third-year ones, to follow this workshop in order to improve their scientific writing facing the final degree project and internship reports.