# \[HILS\] Science Writing Workshop: Communicating with humans outside your discipline February 19, 2019 **Science Writing Workshop:** **Communicating with humans outside your discipline** One of the most important — and challenging — aspects of working as a scientist is communicating your work to those outside your specific discipline. As well as being satisfying in-and-of itself, developing this skill is important for publishing in multi-disciplinary journals (*Nature*, *Science*, and *PNAS*), writing fellowship and grant applications, and teaching at every level. Moreover, science writing can provide career opportunities in publishing, science journalism, and related fields. ▶ **When, Where, and How Often?** ▶ Spring 2019, somewhere around the Harvard Med School Campus (exact location TBD). There will be two-hour workshop every two weeks, and there will be four sessions in total. The exact scheduling will be chosen collectively by workshop participants. ▶ **Who Is This For?** ▶ Graduate students and postdocs in scientific or technical disciplines. To allow thorough discussion of each participant’s work, spaces in the workshop will be limited to 10. ▶ **Is It Free?** ▶ Yes. ▶ **How Much Work Will It Be?** ▶ Workshop participants should expect to write around 1000 words every two weeks, and complete the assigned readings in advance of each session. Writing assignments will include personal essays such as “What I Do Every Day and Why,” explainer pieces such as "How PCR Works," and opinion pieces such as "Why Postdocs Get Paid Enough." Our final piece of writing will be in the style of a “Bites" post — a 600-700 word summary of a published paper in your discipline, written at a “semi- technical” level appropriate for advanced high-school students or first-year undergraduates. Many of these pieces will be suitable for publication on the relevant bites site (softbites.org/our-friends). ▶ **Workshop Leader: Colm Kelleher** ▶ Colm is a postdoc in biophysics at Harvard, where he uses microscopy to study the mechanics of cell division. Colm has blogged for *Scientific American* and *Nautilus* magazines, written and voiced several short online videos for *TED-Ed,* and recently published a coloring book based on his PhD research. He is currently a writer and managing editor for softbites.org. **If you’re interested in participating, please email with your name and a** **sentence or two saying who you are. Spaces in the class are extremely limited, so please don't sign up unless you plan to attend all the workshop sessions and spend 2-3 hours on homework prior to each one.** See also:- [ Articles/Announcements Parent Term ](/postings/news) - [ Announcements ](/postings/announcements) Share on:- [ Facebook ](#) - [ Twitter ](#) - [ Linkedin ](#)