School of Pharmacy News & Media Center
The University of Mississippi

Graduate Students Enhance Skills with Scientific Writing Workshop

Posted on: April 23rd, 2019 by herman

April 23, 2019

By Whitney Tarpy

OXFORD, Miss. – For graduate students, the ability to summarize the results of a laboratory experiment can be as important as the result themselves. 

To emphasize the skill of writing in science, the University of Mississippi School of Pharmacy offered a Graduate Student Scientific Writing Workshop last month, sponsored by the school’s Graduate Student Program office, the BioMolecular Sciences department and Pharmaceutics and Drug Delivery department.

Susan Marriott

Susan Marriott of Axiom Scientific Communications presented materials on enhancing writing skills for grants and manuscripts. Photo submitted.

A total of 44 graduate students attended the two-day workshop at the Thad Cochran Research Center where they learned methods for effective writing, as well as how writing can impact research publications and grants.

“I was thrilled to see many of our graduate students take advantage of this opportunity to expand their writing and editing skills,” said Soumyajit Majumdar, associate dean for research and graduate programs. “This knowledge will serve them well in many aspects of their future research and academic endeavors.”

Susan Marriott, founder, owner and president of Axiom Scientific Communications, presented on the fundamentals of writing during the first day of the course, such as understanding one’s audience, word selection and optimizing sentences and paragraphs.

The second day of the course focused on writing manuscripts and National Institutes of Health grants. Attendees learned about the publication process, the steps of NIH grant funding and how to strategically prepare both documents for review.