Welcome to Effective Biomedical Writing, a training program designed for early career researchers in the biomedical sciences. This program comprises a full course in research article writing and several workshops derived from it, all available as residential events and synchronous online events upon request. Now, two workshops are also available as asynchronous events (work at your own pace) on this digital platform.

In the full course called "Effective Biomedical Writing", you are guided through the steps of writing a research paper using your own data, and you receive feedback and corrections on multiple versions of your manuscript from the instructor, me: Valerie Matarese. I worked in biomedical research in academia and industry for many years before dedicating myself to the editing of research papers for both biomedical journals and individual researcher-authors. On the basis of that long experience, and to address the many problems I was seeing in research manuscripts, I created this training program.

The overarching goal of these training activities is producing reader-friendly writing. This means that a text meets readers’ expectations of the genre (that is, text type) in terms of structure and content. In addition, the text is easy to read and fast to understand. It addresses readers’ needs for information and has a forward flow of information that brings readers along the research narrative. The content is accurate, complete, and usable. These features help a manuscript get published and a grant application get funded.

Reader-friendly writing is what we ultimately produce after substantial effort of drafting, getting feedback, and revising, and revising again. We can contrast it with writer-based writing, which is what we usually produce as a first draft: the first things we put down in writing are useful to us, the writer, as we get our ideas in order. Yet that first draft needs to be transformed, by adding, removing and revising, until it has the features of reader-based, reader-friendly writing. This transformation can be achieved using the techniques illustrated and practiced in these workshops. These techniques are easy to learn and apply, but may require you to unlearn, to break old habits of bad writing that often develop as a result of reading the many poorly written articles published in journals today. And yes, these workshops highlight common errors in research reporting and suggest how to avoid them.

The first workshop, called “Basic Techniques of Scientific Writing in English”, addresses key issues of English grammar and style pertinent to writing research articles and is divided into eight units. The second workshop, called “Reporting Quantities and Statistics”, focuses on the accurate reporting of numerical results and statistical data in text and is divided into 10 units. Each unit has one or two video lessons, a 2-page printable summary, a discussion forum, and a quiz for practicing your new writing skills. I hope you enjoy the program.

Valerie Matarese

September 2022