MME9104: Scientific Writing and Thesis Proposal

This course aims to demystify the writing process and teach the fundamentals of effective scientific writing. Instruction will focus primarily on the process of writing and publishing scientific manuscripts but grant writing will also be addressed. The course will be presented in three segments: Part (1) teaches students how to write effectively, concisely, and clearly and part (2) takes them through the preparation of an actual scientific manuscript or grant and part (3) will be dedicated for the development of the Master Thesis research proposal 
 
Course objectives 

• Learn how to write a coherent article  
• Develop good sentence and paragraph structure  
• Identify and correct the most common and stylistic errors  
• Learn to use powerful language and to write more succinctly  
• Improve grammar and punctuation and edit your work more independently 

 
Learning Outcomes

Knowledge and understanding 
After completing the course, the student shall: 

• Describe the scientific writing process and its key stages;  
• Reflect on what constitutes a research problem to be addressed in a scientific paper;  
• Organize and compose a scientific paper in accordance with the IMRAD (Introduction, Methods, Results and Discussion) model;  
• Analyze and review scientific papers in terms of key message, consistency and justification;  
• Reflect on the benefits of working in teams in scientific writing and describe the rules of co-authorship; 
• Reflect on the ethics in scientific writing 

 
Skills and abilities 

• Able to develop a Master’s thesis research proposal and defend it before the higher degrees committee. 
• Able to write a review manuscript for publication. 

 
Judgement and approach 

Students are able to report scientific findings in a precise and concise way to both a specialized community and a broader audience, and to critically analyze scientific papers following the same criteria. They know how to describe experiments, processes and simulations in a way that ensures their reproducibility, they clearly distinguish results and their discussion, they make sure that conclusions are drawn and indeed substantiated by the reported findings. Finally, they manage to summarize approach, results and conclusions in an appropriate abstract. Students are familiar with the rules and procedures of scientific publishing in international journals.