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Resource of the Week #70: A Written Course on Research Writing

By Barbara Gastel | 11 August 2012

Hello again. Our current Resource of the Week was suggested by graduate student Alejandra (Alex) Arreola, who translates AuthorAID blog posts into Spanish.

The resource is an online course in writing. It is intended primarily to help researchers write and publish biomedical papers in English. However, much of the advice also applies to writing papers in other fields and languages.

The course consists of text to read. Thus, it resembles a short textbook. It has 6 sections, with the following titles:

  1. Scientific writing style
  2. Prewriting stage
  3. Basic composition of a biomedical paper
  4. Publishing
  5. Correct usage of English
  6. Technical and grammatical points

I was pleased to see that this course emphasizes writing clearly and briefly. I also was pleased to see that it contains many examples.

For instance, the course includes an example of using verb tenses correctly in the discussion section of a paper. And it includes many examples of correct and incorrect use of English words that often cause difficulty for non-native speakers.

The course does have a few typographical or other errors. But nevertheless it can be very useful.

Thank you, Alex, for suggesting this resource.

Until the next post—

Barbara