This course will cover both the writing process and the writing product. You will learn writing principles that will you help you to create text that is coherent, cohesive, and clear. A primary goal of this course is to teach you how to "escape" your own expertise in order to identify the parts of your text that will cause a reader difficulties.
The course format will vary from week-to-week, and will include a mix of mini-lectures, exercises, one-on-one feedback, and group discussions of part of a paper (usually written by a course participant but sometimes selected from the literature). In order to get the most out of the class, participants will be expected to do substantial out-of-class writing (about one to two hours per week). The precise content of the course will be tailored to the course participants.
Prerequisites
This course is intended for PhD students and postdocs in Computer Science. For PhD students, I typically prefer that students have already taken my course on how to give scientific presentations. I do make exceptions, but students need to demonstrate that they already have basic competence at communicating scientific ideas verbally.
- Teacher: Rose Hoberman