This is probably the most challenging, energy-consuming, yet intriguing class I have ever taken. Through eight weeks of studying, I've learned how to write in a concise, effective, and engaging way—from choosing words; writing sentences, paragraphs, essays, applying them for academic articles. The first half of this course is very interesting, with lots of examples and exercises to help you improve your writing skills, while the second half gives you the technique of writing compelling academic manuscripts and other types of articles. Certainly, it takes time for me to fully adopt these techniques in honing my writing skill for my future career. But now I am just proud of myself for passing this course (with honor) and achieve the remarkable certification.

Kristin must be an excellent teacher and writer! In this course, she taught me how to write clearly and briefly, with well-organised contents, vivid teaching styles, interesting examples. Needless to say, scientists, especially for the young, are not good at expressing, even though the quality is essential. Given this, kris engaged in logical flow, cutting clutters, rather than grammars and sentence, which requires strong language base. I think I learned how to write happily, without concerning unknown grammars. Only writers know much about writing can give out such useful and interesting contents, kris must be a good writer as well!!!!!!! Highly recommend this course, for those who are in need to learn writing but lack of an English background.

Well, I took this course to see what Stanford had to offer and I must say it was a very insightful course for epidemiologists. We all have an inbuilt nature to think "yeah well, I am an epidemiologist, I can write English". Well this course definitely changed my opinion of how an epidemiologist should write and should not write. They also touch base on how to write articles in lay man's terms. How to handle media exposure about your reserach articles as well as how to grade your peers work and your subordinate's work with appropriate comments. I am very glad to have taken this course and achieved a grade of 90%. I would recommend this to all epidemiologists, experienced or not. Finally I thank Dr.Sainani for her insights and awesome teaching.

I'd like to thank you all for this amazing course, it has changed my prespective regarding writing as a whole process.

Despite my illness - I'm a lupus patient with all the flares I get - I was able to complete this course at my own pace.

I finally did it, and Iam delighted because my knowledge has improved which will affect my research skills and improve my writing as a future post graduate student.

I started to write differently, my writing got more concised, focused and structered.

Also I started to review and edit my relatives public posts and writings upon their request to give better outcomes to their audiences

I'm looking forward to attend another spectacular course by Stanford University.

Yours Sincerly,

Dr.Nagla Zubeidi

Some questions in the HW at the final of each unit are ambigous in my opinion, for example in unit 1: "There are extensive quality control measures that are unique to this pipeline" my response was "Exist extensive quality control measures that are unique to this pipeline" that in my opinion is acceptable but I tried with many oders posibilities but I always got wrong. Or "She was not a good student." my response for this was "She was a disadvantage student" that eliminate the "not", but neither with others options. I don't know where I made a mistake and in feedback just appear "Incorrect". Writing in the sciences was really fruitful for me, it is a great course. Thank you very much. Hugo David Sánchez Chávez.

Coming from a third-world country and studying science has been a rollercoaster; the lack of good professors or teaching methods made it even more challenging. They never showed us how to do the writing process, and when I had to write my first two works, I was unconfident about my skills, and the process was horrible. Soon I'll be starting my master's degree and what worried me the most was how lacking my writing skills were. However, after taking this course, especially receiving corrections and feedback from my companions and reviewing their work, I feel more comfortable and excited to write. Thank you so much, Dr. Kristin Sainani. I will work hard and improve the skills you showed me during this course.

First of all, I am grateful to Dr. Sainani and Coursera for putting up such a well organized course.

The guidelines provided in this course will certainly spare me several frustrating hours of trial and error, trying to piece together a "good scientific manuscript".

The course however, is not restricted to writing just journal articles. It also provides an excellent initiation into the skill of writing grants, LOR, personal statements, review articles.

There is also something in store for those who may want to pursue a career in science communication in the future.

I personally enjoyed the interviews with the journal editors and Dr. Sainani's former students.

All in all, this course is an all-round package.

Very useful course. It gave me a good understanding of the jargon and unpack of science. I would greatly appreciate if a course on thesis writing and research proposal drafting could be given by the instructor. Dr. Kristin Sainaini has well explained the process of writing. I felt a bit bored only when interviewing the scientist and getting information and vice versa. On the other hand, the tips for writing a research paper by senior editors were very much enlightening.

Thank you Dr. Kristin Sainaini and Coursera

Regards

Dr. Jayakumar Rajamani Iyer,

Assistant Professor - Environmental Science,

GITAM (Deemed-to-be-University)

Bengaluru Campus,

Nagadenahalli - 562163

KARNATAKA , INDIA

e-mail: jrajaman@gitam.edu

This course is aimed primarily at people who wish to write about scientific research with many examples from the science field. However, it is also useful for improvement of general writing skills because it covers grammar and punctuation; writing in the active voice; pre-writing; the writing process and editing, among other topics. The process for writing scientific manuscripts e.g. methods, figures, discussion and results are very helpful (especially for newcomers).

The course gives guidance on other relevant topics e.g. plagiarism and authorship; grants and writing letters of recommendation. In less depth, there is advice on speaking to the media and using social media to spread scientific knowledge.

This course has to be mandatory.... The teacher is wonderful, focused, funny and very efficient. I don´t have words enough to describe how much I have learnd and enjoy every practice challenge. No waste of time at all, I wish this teacher prepared more writing courses (is her talent!). THANK YOU VERY MUCH.

Este curso tendría que ser obligatorio para todos los estudiantes post-doctorado. Aunque el sistema anglosajón es diferente del americano, la profesora (cuya buena energía es contagiosa), está focalizada en el tema, no divaga, sabe de lo que habla a la perfección, pone prácticas para que aprendas... es que me ha encantado, la verdad. Ojalá esta profesora tuviera más cursos aquí, los haría sin dudar!

I found this course very useful for my young scientist career. For me, it helped me to improve my thesis writing. English is not my native language so that class about grammar tips and most common mistakes was very helpful for me.

One thing that I also enjoyed was having the opportunity to evaluate my collegues work and vice-versa. Unfortunately I did not receive feedback about the longer task we had (resume an article, do an introduction or an abstract...), therefore I would like to recommend more shorter tasks for this kind of grading. Nevertheless, the comments I have received on other tasks were very important for my writing.

I will recommend this course on my LinkedIn account! Thank you so much.

Very informative and clear. I appreciated the extra content as well as the many examples.

It was nice to get feedback from the other students, I mostly experienced nice and constructive feedback that was very useful to improve my writing.

Only sometimes, I saw comments that were unnecessarily aggressive or superficial. Remember that we are all here to learn and even a harsher criticism can be presented nicely. As for superficial comments, made only to fill the blank space: if you spend 3 minutes on giving feedback instead of 20 seconds, you only "wasted" 2 min and 40 seconds of your time, while somebody else got to learn something. Wouldn't you want the same from the others?

I'm grateful to Dr. Kristen Sainani and Stanford University for offering this valuable online course. Before enrolling, my writing was disorganized and difficult to follow. This course has significantly improved my skills. Dr. Sainani's insights into effective writing and its challenges were inspiring. Her practical overview of the writing and publishing processes was extremely helpful. Watching a professional edit, restructure, and proofread a scientific article was particularly beneficial. I completed the course and all assignments (including the Honors track) but unfortunately missed the opportunity to claim my free certificate during the designated period.

Outstanding course!

The tips and content are very useful and did change my whole relationship with writing and reading. I recommend it for post-graduation students that, just like me, are starting an academic career.

Dr. Kristin Sainani's passion for writing is engaging and inspires the student for further improvements. The course also contains interviews with distinguished experts that successfully unravel the stressful process of publishing.

I must say that the proposed structure of a scientific manuscript does not always apply (for example, in applied social science). However, it's understandable that the course is designed for the biological field.

As a pre-grade student I really apreciate have learnt diferent types of sccientific and academic texts; I liked to think over scientific publish future and the responsability as a future scientist to spread the results en discovers of my investigations and projects. Finally a already put on practice the skills I got, reviewing critically the papers i had to reed this semester and of course using all the good writting tips when writing my subjects homeworks ; Thank to all the team that made this course possible , specially the teacher; Hi from Chile ; Sergio Andrés Plaza Plaza -- Student of natural resources engineering at Austral University of Chile.

I really enjoyed the course and recommend others to take it. Even though I am in research for little less than two decades, no one every taught me how to write a research article. I used to learn it by reading manuscripts and observing the edits of my professors. Now, I understand and know why they were editing in certain ways. In addition, no one taught me how to peer review articles as well. This course covers how to write research articles, peer reviews, news reports and appear media interviews as well. Moreover, you can learn about how to tweet articles and news items. I highly recommend this course for researchers at all stages of their career.

I really enjoyed the course which was very well organized and covered a great amount of information in depth. Dr. Kristin Sainani is an excellent and extremely thorough lecturer. She would refer back to information from earlier modules through the whole course so that the information would be integrated systematically. She is also passionate and dedicated about her subject and very engaged in developing new editors and writers. I learned a lot.

I particularly liked the sample edits so that I could see the approach she took, the reasons she made the edits, and the overarching organization that the edits supported.

Thank you very much, Dr. Sainani

Dr. Sainani is an excellent teacher. I recommend this course to everyone who want to learn how to write and edit more clearly, and not restricted to just the sciences. I just finished an English degree that focused on this material and was shocked by how much I was still able to learn from this free course. There's a lot of helpful advice here on concision, word choice, and structure. The professor also provides many "demo edits" to practice your skills before learning how she--an expert writer and editor--would edit them in a video. This course is put together very well; I really can't say enough good things about it. Thank you Dr. Sainani.

I am a post-doc researcher and performed this course before writing my thesis. I revisit it from time to time and has been so far the most useful course I done in Coursera. The general tips for writing are incredibly useful and were, at the beginning, a bit again my believes of what is scientific writing. However, through all the examples and practices it became clear that these tips are really useful and lead to a more clear, scientific and easy-to-read writing. Plus Dr. Kristin Sainani is amazing at teaching and it was a pleasure to learn under her guidance. An absolute must for people who need to generate scientific manuscripts/reports!

This course is filling a gap in my PhD education in Hungary. Yet, its content is essential to "survive" and become a good researcher, so it was really valuable for me to be able to access it and enroll, even if I'm in the last year of the PhD program. I'd like to thank to Dr. Sainiani and all her colleagues who helped to create this valuable course. Personally, it is a great start for me to begin writing my PhD thesis, a lot of inspiration and valuable tips in the writing style (even if my research field is far from medical). And the other tips I will be able to take with myself for future publications! Thank you again!

Thank you so much Dr. Kristin Sainani

You are an authority and a great teacher in Writing in the Sciences. The course is an eye-opener. I have learned a great deal, especially in the area of structure-parallelism, active voice, and review articles.

Please due to my work schedule which leaves me scanty time to do other things, I would like to access these great lectures from time to time for refreshing. 

How long will these lectures be there to be accessed from the completion date? Is there any certificate for successful completion of the course?

What advice do you have for me?

ThanksFabian EboguCell: 856-397-1181 

Kristin,

As a mid-career clinician I have published previously, read thousands of papers and written countless letters of recommendation. More recently I have tried (and failed) to publish some pieces in medical journals in the "viewpoint" or "perspectives" sections.

I came to your course to humbly learn about how I might do things better and I have.

Writing will remain hard work, but I hope that I might successfully put some of this learning to good effect in the years ahead.

I will recommend this course enthusiastically to others, so look to see if there's an uptick in Australian candidates.

Cheers,

James Fink

This course discussed the basics for competent writing in the sciences. I appreciate that strategies for creating and reviewing manuscripts, plain language summaries, and proposals were included.

Dr. Sainani included other voices (Dr. Efron, Dr. Lundberg, Dr. Friedman) for participants to hear from other experts in the writing field. I would have appreciated one of these interviews to be with someone from outside academia.

Finally, search engine optimization is a topic that scientific writers - particularly outside of academia - would benefit from understanding. A module on this topic would be helpful.

A phenomenal resource for communicators across the board. I'm so grateful it is free and flexible in schedule. The demo edits were great exercises to put into practice the theories, and the feedback was instant in the videos. I think further courses on lay audience publications would be immensely welcomed. I am very curious to learn how a career as a science journalist grew from a start in statistics, and if doing it this way was significant to your ability to learn data for yourself before reading concconcluding remarks in any publication? Finally, thank you very much and wishing you a bbeautiful day.

This is my first experience completing a course on Coursera and it was an honor to have it from Stanford University. I thank a lot from the tutor of this course, Dr. Kristin Sainani. Her patience in teaching and her discussions were catching and delightful. The materials of this course were perfect—especially the demo lessons at the end of each week and the assignments. Besides, the slides were enough, they weren't too much to be exhausting. Finally, I found this course so helpful and I think that every student who wants to pursue his/her academic career should pass this practical course.

Sina Khaleghi