Cultivating Better Writing Skills: What Research-Based Organizations Should Do
How can individual researchers assess their writing strengths and weaknesses (and improve on those weaknesses)? Last week I gave you four ideas.
How can research-driven organizations/institutions help with that assessment and improvement? In many of the same ways:
- Hire a staff editor with some domain expertise to work with its researchers;
- Hire a professional writing coach to evaluate manuscripts and the strengths and weaknesses the researchers are displaying in those manuscripts;
- Put on two- or three-day writing workshops for its researchers, led by a scientific writing coach and scientists who write well (the manuscripts might be peer-reviewed papers, pieces for non-specialists, or a mix of both);
- Develop an internal communications platform where researchers can get candid, supportive feedback on their writing from their peers;
- Develop an external-facing platform (OK, a blog) where researchers can publish at low stakes.