STEM Communication Series: Communicating with Many Audiences Through Writing

Event Date:
December 3, 2020 – 4:00 PM to 5:30 PM

Location:
Zoom

Join blogger and University of New Brunswick professor Dr. Stephen Heard, author of Charles Darwin’s Barnacle and David Bowie’s Spider in the final installment of our STEM Communication Series!

In this workshop you’ll learn about the importance of audience as well as the transferability of writing skills. Dr. Heard has extensive experience writing scientific papers, which have their own well-established language and structural conventions. He then wrote The Scientist’s Guide to Writing, which doesn’t follow those conventions, followed by Charles Darwin’s Barnacle and David Bowie’s Spider, which is genuine “SciComm”, intended for the general public. In addition, for the past 5 years he has maintained a successful blog that is followed by a lay audience as well as by his fellow scientists. Dr Heard explains how all of this has improved his scientific writing by making it more engaging.

As Dr. Heard says, “My path through writing for different audiences alerted me to, and helped me escape, a circular expectation about what scientific writing has to sound like – a circular expectation that I think keeps our literature awful!”

Join us on Zoom December 3 at 4 PM for an engaging final workshop.