Faculty Support: Open Educational Resources for Research Writing

Are you students struggling with scientific writing?

Do you teach a course with a research writing component?

Are you a major professor for graduate students?

Reach out and get support!

The Center for Communication Excellence (CCE) invites interested faculty to engage their students with unique resources for scientific writing.

Preparing to Publish is an open-access e-book (Huffman, Cotos, & Becker, 2021) that offers detailed, step-by-step instructions on how to write up research for publication. It provides a comprehensive description of cross-disciplinary conventions characteristic of Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion/Conclusion sections of research articles and outlines specific strategies that demystify what makes research writing effective. It also offers helpful tips for how to navigate discipline-specific writing and how to understand, dissect, and ultimately craft effective scientific arguments.

Research Writing Tutor is a web-based learning and feedback software for scientific writing in 32 disciplines. It has three interactive modules – Understand Writing Goals, Explore Published Writing, Analyze My Writing – which enable users to progress toward deeper understanding and autonomous use of writing strategies characteristic of Introduction, Methods, Results, and Discussion/Conclusion sections. The Analyze My Writing module uses artificial intelligence to generate individualized automated feedback based on a cross-comparison with published research articles in their disciplines.

Focusing on communicative strategies for effective scientific argumentation, both the e-book and the feedback software are designed for use in formal and informal learning contexts to support the development of research writing competence. These resources can be used as readily accessible instructional or reference materials as well as materials for autonomous learning and practice.