3 Reasons to Spend Your Professional Development Money on Writing

Conferences are an important component of STEM fields whether you’re an engineer, a scientist, or any other STEM professional. Many use their professional development money to invest in events like conferences, where they can simultaneously network, learn about new trends in their field, and share their current research with other experts. In these ways, conferences are a necessary, and smart, investment. Equally as smart, though, is investing in your professional skills by way of communication. In this article, we list 3 reasons why STEM graduate students, faculty, and professionals should invest their professional development money in writing workshops.

Writing workshops help you become familiar with what makes effective, and publishable, writing

Reading research articles for the data, methods, and results of the study is one of the most important exercises a STEM professional can practice. Doing so keeps them updated on new innovations and helps them determine how their own research and voice fit into the larger conversation. But a quality STEM writing workshop will teach you how to read research documents in a different way: with a focus on the language, the audience, and the purpose of the document. By doing so, you gain insights into what makes writing effective, and how best to revise your writing so that you’re an active contributor to the important conversations in your field.

Writing workshops provide insights into how writing works at both the structural and sentence/word level

Do you know there are 4 main moves that you need to make in any introduction section? Do you how to track your ideas so that they’re connecting from sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, and section to section? Do you know that there are several ways to test if your words are the most concise and accurate words for your document? An effective STEM writing workshop will teach you all of these things and more so that your document is framed effectively, and your writing is clear and concise at the paragraph, sentence, and word level.

Writing workshops teach you how to communicate your ideas more successfully

Have you been struggling to get that one journal article accepted for publication? Or have you repeated applied for grant after grant with no success? One way to improve your chances of having your work published and being awarded funding for your research is to make sure your documents clearly explain what your research is and what it offers to the world. A quality STEM writing workshop will help you do this by equipping you with the right tools to help you articulate your exigence, identify your audience, and use your writing skills to persuade them that you and your research are worth investing in.

One very important consequence of using your professional development money for a STEM writing workshop is that you build your confidence as a STEM writer and communicator, a skillset that will help you in both your professional and civic life. At The STEM Writing Institute (SWI) we can help take your writing to the next level, be it for a journal article, a grant/proposal application, or any other STEM document. Register for an SWI workshop today!

Register for an SWI workshop today.

Photo by Dmitry Demidov