Short Films on Scientific Writing
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This website presents short films to teach the most important principles of scientific (or technical) writing to undergraduates, graduate students, and professionals in engineering and science. Providing support for these films was the Leonhard Center in the College of Engineering at Penn State and the National Science Foundation (NSF Grant 1752096).
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Film Views in 2023 525,285 Total Film Views Since 2013 2 years, 356 days Total Time Watched Since 2013 For undergraduates, these films help bridge the gap between general writing and writing as an engineer or scientist. The general writing courses that engineers and scientists take in grade school, middle school, high school, and first-year English do not address the specific challenges of scientific writing. Granted, most engineering and science undergraduates now take a technical writing course, but many of those students often do not do so until their junior or senior year of college. By that time, many of those students have already had to write reports in other courses and write emails and reports for summer internships. For these students, a gap exists between what they have learned about general writing and what is expected in scientific writing. The writing lessons at this website (and in particular the summary lessons) attempt to bridge that gap for undergraduates in engineering and science.
For graduate students, these films discuss specific challenges of research writing. For graduate students who have never taken a research writing course, these films also bridge a gap. In effect, these films provide you with many insights and examples for the research writing that you do. Such insights are valuable not only for your own drafts and revisions but also for your reviews of documents written by others. For professionals, these films serve as a refresher on specific principles of writing as engineer or scientist. For those of you who took a technical writing course some time ago, these films serve as a refresher. Also, the thousands of you who took my own courses and workshops on scientific writing will note several changes in the content of the films. Truth be told, these changes have arisen from your questions, comments, and suggestions over the past thirty years. My students have not only enriched my teaching, but made it more precise. These films contain scores of professional examples. One feature that distinguishes these films is the large number of professional examples. Carefully chosen, these examples provide insights into what separates scientific writing that succeeds from scientific writing that does not. These films are well vetted. Another feature that distinguishes these films is how well vetted they are. In the past thirty years, I have taught the material in these films to thousands of engineers and scientists at institutions such as Simula Research Laboratory in Norway, Pratt & Whitney, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, Pennsylvania State University, Virginia Tech, the European Space Organization, and Shanghai Jiao Tong University. |
Listed below are the most popular films from our collection. Not only are students more than welcome to view these films, but faculty are also welcome to assign these films in courses.
Scientific Writing in General
Importance of Writing of Engineers and Scientists (2:00) Why the Study of General Writing Is Not Enough (1:40) Analyzing Audience (3:59) Analyzing Purpose (3:52) Analyzing Occasion (4:22) Making the Team Writing Process Effective (4:55) Reports: Tutorial Organization of Reports (5:10) Writing in Sections (5:29) Incorporating Illustrations and Equations (4:15) Language: Being Precise, Clear, and Concise Being Precise and Clear (2:21) Avoiding Ambiguity (4:30) Cutting Needless Words I (4:33) Cutting Needless Words II (3:10) Language: Making Connections Connecting Ideas: Overview (4:40) Connecting Ideas: The Problem (5:23) Connecting Ideas: A Strategy (2:16) Transitional Phrases (4:07) Connecting with Different Sentence Openers I (4:51) Connecting with Different Sentence Openers II (4:11) Connecting with Different Sentence Openers III (5:09) Connecting Ideas: Conclusion (2:33) Language: Choosing Strong Verbs Choosing Strong Verbs: Position in Sentence (5:16) Choosing Strong Verbs: Allowing Inanimate Objects to Act (4:17) Choosing Strong Verb: Use the First Person (4:14) Choosing Strong Verbs: Summary (4:52) Grammar, Punctuation, and Usage: Tutorial Avoiding Grammar Error: Overview (1:34) Part I of Grammar: Writing Sentences, Not Fragments (5:30) Part I of Grammar: Phrases and Dependent Clauses (5:47) Part II of Grammar: Adding Phrases and Clauses (3:26) Part II of Grammar: Writing Sentences, Not Run-Ons (8:53) Punctuation: Periods and Commas (9:22) Punctuation: Advanced Punctuation (8:46) Usage: Basic Word Choice (4:43) Usage: Advanced Word Choice (3:20) Usage: Verb Tense (4:28) Usage: Expressing Numbers (4:40) Research Papers: Tutorial Knowing Your Audience (2:55) Organization of Research Paper (3:15) Introduction of a Research Paper (9:11) Emails: Tutorial Analyzing What the Audience Knows (2:04) Analyzing Why the Audience Is Reading (1:19) Analyzing How the Will Read (2:31) Subject Lines (4:34) Opening Paragraph (4:34) Writing the Middle (3:13) Writing the Ending (1:15) Presentations: Tutorial PowerPoint's defaults are weak (5:01) Build your scientific talks on messages (4:52) Support your messages with visual evidence, not topics (4:30) Use slides only when they are necessary (3:28) Structuring a Scientific Talk (6:38) Delivering a Scientific Talk (5:40) More Presentation Films These films provide support for writing courses. The purpose of these online films is not to replace current courses on scientific or technical writing. On the contrary, the purpose is to strengthen such courses. In fact, instructors of those course are encouraged to assign specific films from this site to supplement their own instruction. Doing so allows these instructors to focus more class periods on critiquing the writing of their students and cover advanced topics such as strategies for a particular type of document.
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