I and many others working in scicomm frequently make a sharp distinction between scicomm and scientific communication. And, that distinction lumps scholarly/academic writing into the latter category, making it a realm that I don’t usually focus on or intervene in.
But, part of my research program directly emphasizes interventions that help grad students get better at scholarly writing. What gives?
Well, there is considerable overlap in the competencies needed for effective, ethical scicomm and being successful as a graduate student. The results collaborators and I are seeing with our intervention-based studies (and the related findings I’m writing up in my forthcoming book) align with prior research [1].
What we’re all finding is that these competencies are indeed transferable, and it is beneficial to students to practice both in order to get better at either.
I said just last week that my goal is to enhance these scicomm and leadership skills. That means reckoning with (and troubleshooting) the barriers to graduate students and other early career STEM professionals getting approval, let alone support, to spend enough time on scicomm to learn to do it well. Plus, no matter how much I want the academy to embrace scicomm, I’m well aware that it currently doesn’t, at least not systemically [2].
I’m pretty convinced at this point that the only way we’re going to really change this is by also helping students get competent and confident at their primary job: becoming a capable researcher.
Now, I’m not an ecologist (though I’m not not a scientist), but and I’m a competent researcher. Furthermore, I am deeply trained in writing and teaching writing (arguably more than most folks with a faculty appointment in a life sciences department). Years ago, I determined that writing is an aspect of the “developing a capable researcher” curriculum that I definitely want to contribute to [3]. I’m especially motivated to do so because (a) most STEM faculty and other mentors have zero formal training in writing instruction and (b) on my campus, resources to support grad student writers are quite hit-or-miss. This gets me into the “work I can uniquely do” sweet spot I’m concentrating on.
As I’ve written about many times in the past, students are generally stressed out, anxious, or even terrified and despairing about their scholarly writing skills. And, that concern is justifiable given the prevalence of judgemental, negative, and ad hominim “feedback” most students have received since roughly middle or high school [4]. Furthermore, as I’ve mentioned, we’re asking students to write in a new, exclusionary dialect without providing them much real orientation to where this writing style came from and whether we should even still adhere to it.
So, we need to make graduate writing in STEM less scary. But how?
Well, I’ve been working on one solution for the past five years. So far, our results so far indicate it’s (a) working and (b) should be replicable!
In 2020 (before everything shut down), a collague and I launched a “mindset bootcamp” to make writing less scary. This is a 12-week program (6 weeks fall, six weeks spring), open to any grad student affiliated with our institution. So, that makes it available to main campus, branch campus, and distance students.
Our process is this:
We invite students talk about what freaks them out about writing and the bad feedback experiences they’ve had in the past.
We facilitate discussions where students discover that the writing norms in their fields vary widely.
Then, we connect students to healthy models for writing mindsets, habits, etc. We also connect them to a lot of advice and resources, and foster a community of peers.
The program comprises: weekly, synchronous, online workshops, panels of advisors, campus resources, and writers at all career stages, peer support, writing accountability groups, and readings/activities to enhance writing mindsets and habits.
All of these approaches are based in the robust research literature on teaching people how to write. This literature comes primarily from the fields of Writing Studies and Rhetoric and Composition. Ultimately, this entire program is an example of transdisciplinary research and practice that reminds participating students of a key insight. Even though most scientists don’t dig into the Writing Studies literature (or fill-in-the-blank field), we can and should, given it can be really helpful to us.
Our findings are aligned with at least 50 years’ worth of evidence in Writing Studies that developing writers and early career scientists need to see writing as a key element of the work they’re learning to do as scholars. We emphasize writing isn’t something we do at the end, once we’re done doing science. We also emphasize that viable, emotionally sustainable approaches to writing involve sharing your drafts and getting feedback often, at all stages of polish. Working in isolation is not just lonely, it’s usually psychologically counterproductive, and our goal is to help students embrace a shift to collective development of their writing skills.
Great. But does it work?
Short story: yes!
We’ve been using a mixed-methods approach with pre-post surveys to track students’ perceptions about six domains of scholarly writing behaviors. And, in all six domains, we’re seeing statistically significant results. What’s especially exciting is that these results are being documented after only the first six weeks in the program.
Moreover, we needed very little investment to make this program happen [5]. As we discuss in our first paper on the program, the logistics of this program make it affordable, quite light-weight in terms of instructional demands, and agile in response to institutional change. As a supplement to the paper, we’ve provided our curricular plan, reading list, etc. The nature of the program, accompanied by these resources, makes this program readily transferable to other institutions. Your grad program or department could easily adapt it without needing to make major investments.
These outcomes are a BIG deal.
I know; everyone says their results matter. :)
But really.
Here's why:
1. Supporting student writers buys us time to support them (as researchers and eventually as scicommers).
Attrition rates for grad students are around 50% [6], with a lot of students dropping out ABD (all-but-dissertation/defended). If I want to help students build their scicomm skills, we have to retain them long enough to do so. That means we have to help students deal with writing more productively. Enhancing grad student retention in this way is both a humanitarian issue and an economic and civic necessity.
2. Fostering these skills contributes to the essential productivity of the institution.
We’ve supported 432 students through this program so far, enhancing their writing abilities with productive, evidence-based mindsets and habits. If even a quarter of these students see their writing through to a single publication, we’re talking over 100 publications that very possibly might not have happened due to the debilitating anxiety, self-doubt, and lack of understanding of how iterative and social writing is in academia. If we wanted to be really conservative, at 10%, we’re still talking 40+ publications, which we all know is the primary bean being counted in academia.
3. Because this program is a major benefit to graduate students and thereby to the research programs that they work in, this investment should come from the institution as a whole, not just our departments.
We’re in our 5th year of this program, and the two of us running this program have mostly relied on the goodwill of our supervisors to include this program in our job descriptions. Without that official allocation of responsibility, we wouldn’t be able to sustain this program. And, we’re both seeing other opportunities and pressures on the horizon, which means we need a more sustainable, deliberate approach to resourcing this program and our time. We’re also building the institution’s reputation, both by supporting so many more/future publications and by disseminating this model for use nationally and internationally. It’s time for our institution to step up and invest in this program, those of us running it, and thereby, the students participating in it.
Three things you should know if you decide to adopt this program
This program does not teach students to write (nor to write in a particular field or style) [7]. This program teaches students to conceive of themselves as writers, and to embrace writing as part of the core work of being a writing professional.
This is one of the rare professional development activities that might actually “count,” because it is so closely tied to the beans academia values most. with that in mind, you should absolutely not develop your own version of this program on your campus without compensation. Ideally, you’ll be generously, monetarily compensated. At minimum, this work should be included in your teaching load (not function as overload teaching or service/admin that is low-value). And, if you have the bandwidth, establish collaborations with social science researchers so that you can study the outcomes of your program, thereby further validating the allocation of your time and attention (and institutional funding) to this effort.
You might run into pushback from colleagues or departments who think you’re on their turf. You’ll want to frame this progrma to be very clear about point 1, so that people don’t mistake your program efforts as a misdirection from their specific field’s writing styles or as redundant to an existing grad writing class (e.g., classes on writing a proposal, writing a lit review, writing a dissertation, or writing a manuscript).
Post script: If all this sounds great, but you don’t have the bandwidth for it on your own, please reach out. I would love to swap notes and see if there’s a way that I, and/or my collaborators, can help you support the developing writers in your sphere of influence.
NOTES
For example, see Alpert 2016, J Museum Ed; Feldon et al 2011, Science; Jensen et al 2008, Sci & Pub Pol; and Merkle & Heard forthcoming Nov. 2025, Univ. Chicago Press. Follow this link for my brief bibliography about enhancing scicomm through institutional change, which includes these and related references.
As always, I’ll refer you to Broder & Merkle et al. (2024) for a robust discussion of this suite of issues.
This gets me into the “work I can uniquely do” sweet spot I’m concentrating on. As always, see Beronda Montgomery for her genuinely life-changing insights about how to operate as an academic from self-affirmation (not for external affirmation). Her framing of work one can uniquely do has been seriously helpful for me.
My co-author Steve and I get into this in detail in our book; you can pre-order that here! There’s also a looooooot of research on this topic.
A substantial institutional investment would help us make a bigger, better difference. But realistically, this is a shoestring program, which makes it fairly replicable.
See Gardner 2009; Litalien and Guay 2015, both cited in our paper on this program.
If you’re looking for that program, see the phenomenally generous resources Stephen Heard has compiled. Follow that link, and you’ll get his entire, semester-long, grad course in scientific writing, including slides. You should absolutely couple that with a copy of Steve’s very useful book for each of your students.