During the 2018-2019 academic year, I participated in Trinity’s inaugural Writing Fellows program, which gave me an opportunity to reflect with my colleagues from across the College (and from the writing and rhetoric program in particular) about teaching writing in my discipline. During this program, I researched previous publications on teaching writing to chemistry students and implemented many of the ideas I found as well as my own ideas in Chem 311: Analytical Chemistry, which serves as the writing intensive course for the chemistry and biochemistry majors.
In March 2019, I gave a talk at Pittcon in Philadelphia on this topic. My slides highlight a number of resources and adaptable assignments and strategies that may be useful to other faculty.
In addition, I have assembled several useful links:
- Learning to Write in Chemistry, a 2016 RSC Feature article by Michael Seery
- A 1999 J Chem Educ article by Donna Sherwood and Jeffrey Kovac presenting a taxonomy for writing in chemistry
- A 2016 J Chem Educ article by Andrea Gay van Duzor on the DEOI method for lab notebooks
- A 2012 CBE Life Sciences article on a community of writing-to-learn (WTL) STEM instructors, which includes many useful references