You know that you need to publish your work. You need to get your science into the journals, and into the public record. That's the only way it is going to become relevant to society and advance knowledge in your field. But, getting your science out there is not the only thing that's at stake; it's also your career that's at stake. In the academic world, publications are the currency of the realm. Publications are how you build your CV or resume. Publications are what make you stand out from all the other graduates who are looking for a job, a fellowship, or a professorship. Maybe your plan is to go into industry, and you don't care about credentialing yourself for the academic world. Well, you still need to publish to establish your technical skills and ability to achieve results. Don’t forget, you need to publish to graduate.

If you are a master's student, a PhD student, a postdoc, or maybe even a new professor in the sciences, and you need to publish a paper, then I'm here for you. Maybe you don't know where to start. Maybe you're just overwhelmed. Maybe you have adequate writing skills, but you're not sure how to put all of the parts of the paper together. Maybe you just need a system and a process. Whatever it is that is holding you back, my course will walk you through the steps you need to take to get your paper ready to submit to your target journal, or to get your thesis/dissertation chapter completed. 

It doesn’t matter if English is your first language or not, the steps in this course will work for everyone in a scientific field. We focus on the steps and the process of getting your manuscript or thesis chapter DONE, not on wordsmithing or correct grammar. Of course, those things are important too, but until you have finished your manuscript you don’t need to worry about them.

Scientific writing is hard, until you crack the code. And chances are, there's no one at your university who is going to teach you how to do it. There might be a workshop once a year, yes, and your advisor is supposed to help you with this, but in reality you are pretty much on your own. Your university probably does have a Writing Center and maybe your advisor has told you to go to there for help. Well, the people in the Writing Center are really good at what they do, which is primarily to help undergraduate students with their composition and rhetoric classes, or their literature classes, or creative writing classes, and other English department types of writing. In my experience, the people at the Writing Center would like to help you, but they've never done scientific writing. So they're not of much assistance in your specific and very niche type of writing.

You could talk to your friends about it, but they're in the same boat as you. All of you are being expected to learn how to generate scientific writing just by reading other people's scientific writing. And that might work for a small percentage of the population, but that doesn't work for most of us. Most of us need someone to guide us through the process, and that's what I'm here for.

So what is keeping you from getting the guidance that you need to write your paper? For one, it probably just does not exist on your campus. And if it does exist on your campus, chances are it's just a token couple of workshops once or twice a year. These workshops can be valuable, they're not complete. That is, they don't walk you through the entire process start to finish. 

You can find advice articles on “How to” do scientific writing galore, but most of them are just a list of “do’s and don’ts” or they are grammar tips. You can read them all day long and still not know HOW to write your paper, step-by-step.

Maybe your school does have a scientific writing class. If so, take it! But if it fills up and you can’t get in, or the timing does not work for you, consider this course. I bet this one costs less, too.

Another reason you are not getting this kind of guidance is because there's just not much else out there that takes you step by step. Unlike other online scientific writing courses that are focused more on stylistic aspects of writing, this one is about the process, and how to go from nothing to a completed article. So, now that you have my course available there's nothing to stop you from getting your article done.

Why would you take my course for help with scientific writing? First of all, because I've been in your shoes and I understand what you're going through. It took me way, way too long to write my first paper, and second, and third. But I had to write a thesis for both my MS and PhD and publish my work to graduate. It was a very intimidating process. I always wondered to myself, is this good enough? Is this how it's supposed to be done? Is this what my paper is supposed to look like?

By the time I got a job as a faculty member at a major research university as an assistant professor I had published seven papers with major help from my advisors. But now it was time to start publishing and writing grant proposals on my own. My grants were getting rejected, my papers were getting rejected, and I didn't really know why. It was all very frustrating. I began to realize that my advisors had given me corrections and edits, but never any real feedback. I would take these corrections make the changes in my paper but I wasn't really learning anything. I wasn't gaining awareness, even though I had been getting plenty of practice.

After a few years as an assistant professor, I was asked to start teaching a scientific writing course. Now the pressure was on. I had to really, truly learn about scientific writing. So I set out on a crash course. I found some mentors and began studying expert advice. My mentors helped me to see that there is a formula to scientific writing. All the years I had been doing it, no one had taught me that there was a scientific writing formula. All those hours, days, weeks, even months, that I wasted struggling through the writing process, all because I didn't know there are simple structural guidelines to make it easy.

Armed with knowledge about process and structure, I taught scientific writing to students and postdocs through my face-to-face course on campus, one-on-one coaching, and in workshops. I also started a scientific writing center to help graduate students and postdocs with their scientific writing problems.

What I'm going to do in this course is distill all the lessons I've learned over all my years of scientific article writing, mentoring students, and studying and teaching scientific writing. I will pack them into a step-by-step set of instructions to write your scientific journal article in 10 weeks. I will guide you through the writing process from the very beginning until the time you are ready to submit your manuscript to your target journal.

What does success look like for this course? Well, that's pretty easy to measure. If you complete this course and all the action lists, you will have a complete, edited, revised, and ready-to-submit manuscript of your scientific journal article. I don't know about you, but I'm always really excited, really proud, and I feel a major sense of accomplishment when I submit my manuscript. It's one of the best feelings in the world. It makes me feel unstoppable. I want you to have that same success and experience that same feeling.