“This course combines all my interests and experiences,” says Andres Carlstein about Writing in Health and Human Physiology (HHP 3900), the course that he designed and has taught for five years. Over seven hundred HHP majors have learned multiple genres of scientific and professional writing, giving them the competitive edge they need for admission to graduate school and/or to launch their careers.
Former student Joseph MacDonald agrees that the course was a wonderful opportunity for him: “Scientific writing over the last century has had the rap of being incomprehensible and unclear to nonexperts –and it’s not because the material is complex. Knowing this, I leapt at the chance to improve my writing skills as a future science communicator.”
As a pre-med undergraduate at Penn State, Carlstein jumped through all the hoops to get into medical school. But when he took a motorcycle trip from New York to Argentina, his parents’ country of origin, and published a book about his trip, he realized that he wanted to be a writer, not a doctor. Before receiving his MFA in fiction here at the Writer’s Workshop, he worked as a technical writer, copyeditor, and head-hunter. He is presently working on a historical novel based on the true story of a kidnapping in Argentina in the 1800s.
Danny Khalastchi, Director of Iowa’s Magid Center for Undergraduate Writing, hired Carlstein to design and teach courses in 2013. At first, he designed popular six-week, Quick Fix courses, including "Improve your Grammar" and “Get a Job.” Then Khalastchi suggested they come up with something bigger and more academic to take advantage of Andres’ science background. They designed a science writing course and pitched it to various science departments. Health and Human Physiology grabbed at the opportunity, seeing the potential for their students to develop their science and professional communication skills.
Investing in a writing course as an elective for their majors has definitely paid off for the Health and Human Physiology Department and many of their 2500 majors. The course fills up rapidly and some semesters, Carlstein has had to teach five 20-student sections! The course benefits HHP majors headed for any kind of graduate or professional school (med school, dental school, physician assistant and physical and occupational therapy programs, public heath). They learn to apply writing in many situations and they tackle some important genres, such as a personal statement, a popular science article, an interview with a scientist, and a critique of a scientific paper.
Carlstein’s favorite assignment in the course is the personal statement. “HHP students are bright and highly motivated, but they may never have written much about themselves,” he notes. Carlstein enjoys watching them improve as they learn how to effectively represent themselves for admissions committees.
He also explains the rationale behind the assignment to interview a scientist: at first most readers care more about people than about scientific ideas or research. When they read good writing about a versatile and passionate person, they will then care more about their scientific work. Therefore, Carlstein has students ask about the scientist as a person before they ask about their research. Carlstein has taught the course so often that many HHP researchers have already been over-interviewed, so he has students choose scientists from Biology, Chemistry, Environmental Science, and Physics.
Scientific writing for readers of newspapers and news magazines teaches students to adapt their ideas and their language to appeal to the general non-scientist reader. The culminating assignment teaches students that scientists as well as journal editors are human and make mistakes. By modeling the process, Carlstein teaches students to read scientific papers critically, searching for errors of omission, logic, and structure. Finding flaws in science writing gives students confidence in their own critical abilities and brings science down from its pedestal.
Carlstein does informal written “meditations” with students to enhance their ability to access their unconscious creativity. He asks students to do a modified version of a thought exercise used by Marylin Robinson, the novelist, in which students attempt to visualize and describe a “luminous” object from the past, say, a favorite toy or their grandmother’s cookbook. A second exercise asks them to write about how they became interested in science. The third exercise combines the first two by asking how their luminous object connects to the reasons they are pursuing science. The next pair of exercises also has students connecting concepts. First, they write about who their scientist hero is, followed by what they see as a fundamental problem in science and then relate them. All formal assignments are peer workshopped in small groups, but informal writing is usually just reviewed in pairs.
Clearly the course has had a positive impact on HHP majors. Says Carlstein’s former student Rishika Avvari, “My professional writing skills have significantly improved since taking Carlstein's course. He showed us how to represent ourselves through cover letters, resumes, and personal statements in a strong, concise way, and it's been a handy skill to lean on in other areas of writing as well!”