This course is an introduction on how to get your message across in writing as a physical scientist. We concentrate on refereed papers and proposals/job applications but also touch upon other formats. The course is aimed at beginning scientific writers, PhD students and junior postdocs, but more experienced writers may find many aspects interesting, eye-opening, or simply useful in developing their own writing. The skills learned in this course will be more generally applicable as well, whether or not you not plan to build a further career as an academic.

During the course and the exercises, you will refer to your own writing when we discuss items like title, abstract, introduction, or paragraph and sentence structure, so bring with you your latest paper, whether in early draft form or already submitted to a journal.

Syllabus:

1. Writing in science

Refereed papers are an important vehicle in science, but not the only format where writing is needed. We will start the course by analysing what writing in science is about, and how you can optimise your written products. Among other aspects, we will study the optimum structure of a paper: where and how do you provide the information?

How to transform your scientific results in a story? And how to then write that story in a clear and precise way so you can produce a good paper? How do you put emphasis?

We will analyse how you catch a reader’s attention in our current era of information overload, and highlight the importance of title and abstract.

2. How to write your papers?

You will learn to optimally structure your text, from the entire text down to the paragraphs and to individual sentences, thereby writing for the reader. How can topic sentences make paragraphs do their job?

We will highlight grammar rules you need to know so that you will write papers that are pleasant to read as well as correctly written. We will also revise the typesetting conventions that are used in our field, referring to publishers’ Instructions for Authors and to LaTeX.

3. How to write a proposal or job application?

Whether you want to get experiment time on a large facility, access to supercomputers, apply for a post-doc position or a prestigious fellowship, get a tenured job, or get funding for your research, you will need to write proposals. And they need to stand out in order to be successful. In this session, you will learn the recipes to follow and the pitfalls to avoid.

We will also highlight how you can make and maintain an effective CV, and discuss how you can enhance the effect of your reference letters.

4. How to make optimal use of AI tools?

AI tools, including large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT or Claude, are revolutionising our lives as scientists. We will consider the advantages and possible pitfalls of the use of AI in preparing your written products, and analyse how you can optimise their use.

This course expands on what we wrote in the following Perspective papers in Nature Astronomy. They are widely applicable across the physical sciences, even though they were specifically written for astronomers. More general papers and books about scientific writing are referenced. We recommend participants to read these three papers before attending the Short Course.

• Chamba et al. 2022: https://rdcu.be/cVdtK How to plan your astronomy research paper in ten steps
• Knapen et al. 2022: https://rdcu.be/cVdtJ How to write and develop your astronomy research paper
• Knapen et al. 2025: https://rdcu.be/evDCt How to prepare competitive proposals and job application