Microbiology 2020 Newsletter

MICR 3333 provides students with opportunities to develop scientific writing abilities. Scientific writing is widely seen as an important skill for a range of careers and for obtaining advanced degrees. But what can undergraduate students do to hone their science writing abilities? MICR 3333 Molecular Life Science Writing provides an exciting opportunity to do just that. This course was first taught in 2016 and is now offered every Spring semester. It is an online course and is a collaboration between Prof. Wouter Hoff from MMG and Prof. Anna Sicari from the OSU Writing Center. The philosophy of this course is that the best way to develop and improve writing skills is to take the plunge and prepare, write, critique, and revise scientific documents. Each student selects a theme from the molecular life sciences and writes three documents around this theme: a “microreview” that discusses a recent scientific publication, a chapter from a high school textbook, and finally a science journalism column based on an interview with an OSU researcher. For each of these documents students brainstorm and prepare, write and submit a first draft, review (double blind) similar documents written by other students taking the course, and then submit a final, revised version. Students receive feedback on how to prepare and revise their documents during online meetings with Writing Fellows from the OSU Writing Center. At the end of the semester these documents generated by the students in MICR 3333 are published online in the undergraduate science journal Microreviews in Cell and Molecular Biology, which was created for this purpose. The document handling and publishing is done using a professional-grade software. The experience that students obtain in document submission, review, and revision is identical to the way in which professional researchers work to have their scientific results reviewed by peers and published. Check it out at: https://undergradsciencejournals.okstate.edu/index.php/MRCMB/index The writing skills of students enrolled in this course increase and improve as they proceed through the writing process of preparing, drafting, peer-reviewing and revising these three different types of scientific texts aimed at different audiences. MICR3333: Molecular Life Science Writing Dr. Wouter Hoff Microbiology Professor