The Department of Writing is inviting students to register for Science Writing (WRTG-31400-01, CRN 41115) next semester (Spring 2023): Tuesday, Thursday, 1:10 p.m. (Smiddy 114).
This advanced expository course (designated Writing Intensive for the college’s Integrative Core Curriculum) teaches journalistic and literary writing for general and specialized journals. Students learn to convey scientific facts and theories to professional and discerning lay readers through description, analogy, narrative, and reasoning. The course also covers the technical and scholarly conventions of formal scholarly writing, such as research proposals, publication formats, and APA and CSE citation styles. Lectures include important humanistic essays from the history of science, as well as articles and features from contemporary popular science and scholarly publications.
Science Writing is an elective in our major’s Feature and Professional Writing concentrations and also serves students of Communication, Environmental, Health and Natural Sciences. Accordingly, the course encourages dialogue, debate, and collaboration among aspiring journalists, creative non-fiction authors, publicists, and lobbyists, as well as future clinicians, educators, researchers, scientists, and technicians. Her main focus is therefore on institutional scholarship itself, examining its history, organization, politics and ethics through the lenses of rhetoric and writing.
For more information, you can download the course schedule at:
Course Prerequisites: Junior Standing (freshmen and sophomores are welcome with instructor permission); one of the following: WRTG 20100 or WRTG 21300 and two science courses; or a Level 1 composition course from WRTG 10600 to WRTG 16500 and three courses (at least one above Level 1) in health and natural sciences.
The alternative requirements allow easy access for students who are not majors and minors in writing. If you have problems registering online, please contact Dr. Anthony Di Renzo at direnzo@ithaca.edu.
Scientific writing will not be offered again until spring 2025. Please encourage your students to take this opportunity to explore why scholarly writing is America’s fastest growing publishing field.
