by Morgan McArthur, biology GLA

As an undergraduate engineering student, writing assignments always seemed like a chore to me. “Why should I spend a few hours writing when my equations show the results right here?” That line of thinking persisted until the final year of my undergraduate program when I was taking my senior design course. In that class, we had multiple lectures on writing research papers and how communicating my results to different audiences was important to engineering. Before that realization, I was only writing for my professors. So even though I received high grades, the process of writing was tedious and passionless.

Although my experience was perhaps an extreme example, it shouldn’t take until senior year for any student to realize their writing has vital value for both others and themselves. As a GLA for two Biology lab sections this semester, I wanted to show students early in their undergraduate careers that writing had a very important role both in their education and in their future jobs. As such, I decided I would emphasize the importance of communicating one’s learning and experiments through writing, rather than just giving them writing assignments. Luckily for me, biology labs are designed to walk students through the process of writing a research paper, so inserting my own thoughts and experiences during these sections has been simple.

That said, there have been many challenges. Many students enter biology labs with the same mentality that I used to have. They focus on the experiment we perform, while minimizing the importance of communicating their observations and the significance of those observations. While students may be attentive and interactive while using microscopes to analyze bugs, they may lose interest when the class shifts to “less interesting” topics like the methods section of a research paper, even if the experiment relates to the writing topic. Keeping student interest high over a two-hour period with both hands-on and lecture components can be quite difficult.

One of my most common strategies when teaching writing is to relate it to my own experience.

And yet, having students practice writing while reiterating its importance has impacted my students over the weeks, if only slightly. Over the past two years, I have gained a moderate amount of experience writing both conference papers and research papers. One of my most common strategies when teaching writing is to relate it to my own experience. I can emphasize the importance of writing with your audience in mind or how important it is to justify your results in the discussion section of a scientific paper by connecting it to my own scientific writing. By using examples from my own life, I have seen students’ eyes staying attentive rather than glazing over.

Through my approach to teaching the importance of writing, I have been able to spark some interest in the class, leading to insightful discussions (both myself/student and student/student) and thoughtful writing assignment submissions from my students. What this experience has proven to me is that ALL students, even STEM-focused ones, can care about writing. The key is to show them WHY they should care.