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The University of Winnipeg

Mitacs Training Course: Build Your Scientific and Technical Writing Skills

Thu. Nov. 7 09:00 AM - Fri. Nov. 8 05:00 PM
Contact: MITACS
Location: TBD


Make an impact with your scientific and technical writing skills! This two day, hands-on course is aimed at those with scientific and technical backgrounds. From structure and grammar to impact – get on-site expert feedback, a chance to work on a current, future, or past piece of your writing, and get exposure to many samples of writing, from atrocious to outstanding. 

Course Objective:

To increase participant awareness and application of tools and exercises available to them to better present their research and knowledge in written form.

Learning Outcomes:

Through participating and completing this course, participants will: 

  • Broaden their perspective on the importance of the writing process
  • Learn to analyze their audience and plan the writing process accordingly
  • Be able to identify all aspects of technical reports
  • Learn effective editing techniques
  • Understand how to use graphics to make an impact and support an argument

Key Topic Areas:

Overall writing process

  • common pitfalls, dealing with procrastination, staying motivated
  • the importance of the writing process (inventing, drafting, editing, and revising)
  • audience analysis, understanding purpose, tone, and genres
  • effectively organizing documents and using standard forms (i.e., theses, journal papers, poster presentation, other reports)
  • persuasive and informative writing
  • aspects of technical reports (i.e., abstracts, introductions, results, and conclusions)

Editing and visuals

  • principles of punctuation
  • revising sentences for order (sentence structure, ordering ideas)
  • revising sentences for clarity (avoiding general language, vague this subjects, noun strings, and prepositional phrases)
  • revising sentences for conciseness (importance of descriptive verbs, avoiding empty sentence openers)
  • revising for connection (structuring paragraphs, transitions between sentences)
  • effective use of graphics (appropriate types of graphs, proper use of colour and layout, incorporating graphics into text)

Register online using the Mitacs EDGE Platform: https://edge-reg.mitacs.ca/