‘Science Communication’ workshop for students and ECRs in the mineral sciences
Week 1: The first week of our series of five webinars went really well. Rowena is fun and engaging. She has kindly shared her slides (with annotations added by delegates in some cases!). This week’s talk was introductory in nature.
Week 2: The second week was equally engaging, this week focusing on writing for childre. Again, Rowena has made her slides available (also with annotations). Week 2 focused on writing for children.
Week 3: We’re in the groove now! Here are the slides from week 3. This week we focused on writing for the general public.
Week 4: This one is a little different. Rowena introduced Cristiana Vagnoni, from the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology. Together they spoke about writing for policy makers. Here are the slides from week 4. Cristiana also shared this set of links to resources about: UK Parliament for Researchers
Week 5: And the final episode, week 5. This was where we examined pieces of writing submitted by some of the delegates and gave feedback on approach, style and content.
Here are some comments from delegates:
- “Thank you very much for the engaging talk!!”
- “Nice session, thank you very much Rowena”
- “Enjoyed that! Thanks!”
- “Absolutely brilliant, thanks”
- “Thank you very much; this was one of the most useful webinars I have attended in a long time”
- This has become the highlight of my week
- Thank you, brilliant, see you next week
- Excellent speakers
The Mineralogical Society, the Applied Mineralogy Group and the Mineral Deposits Studies Group organized a writing workshop for students and early career researchers. The course was designed to help us think about how to represent information about our research to make it readable by non-specialists. Please register below if you are interested in attending. This course is open to all. There is no charge and the course will consist of five weekly, one-hour sessions from 22 January–19 February 2021.
The course was delivered by Rowena Fletcher-Wood, an environmental chemist and a science communications tutor with 13 years of experience. Rowena invites you to:
“Migrate your science from research report to public understanding! Cement your skills by compacting your message, identifying your audience’s interests, and getting to the core of self-evaluation. We will apprehend fundamental bloopers and introduce techniques such as storytelling and narrative structure to provide a solid foundation for any written piece.
In this interactive 5-part series of training modules, we cycled through writing for children, the general public and for policymakers and talk about the importance of platform, curriculum, and purpose. We mentioned graphs, diagrams and equations, and provided resources to take away.
This series of workshops was open to all and was free of charge.