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What is the Write Like a Chemist Project?

The Write Like a Chemist project is a National Science Foundation Division of Undergraduate Education Course, Curriculum, and Laboratory Improvement (CCLI) sponsored initiative. The major goal of the project is to develop an approach to discipline-specific writing instruction—with accompanying textbook, Web site, and instructor’s manual—that will assist chemistry faculty in teaching chemistry-specific writing skills to upper-division chemistry students.

The Write Like a Chemist approach and textbook, developed at Northern Arizona University, are designed to transition chemistry students from the language, writing skills, and genres required in liberal studies courses and undergraduate chemistry lecture and laboratory classes to the language, writing skills, and genres used by career chemists. The Write Like a Chemist textbook focuses on three types of writing, each one targeting a different audience and serving a different purpose:

• The journal article
• The research proposal
• The scientific poster

For a general overview of the project, see a poster that was presented at a national ACS conference.

In the course of piloting Write Like a Chemist materials in institutions around the U.S., we have learned that the materials are also useful for graduate students who are writing theses, dissertations, and/or their first journal articles. Chemistry majors who ultimately decide to pursue other careers, such as the health professions, benefit from learning to write like a chemist as well; the read-analyze-write approach endorsed in the textbook is readily transferable to other disciplines.

The Write Like a Chemist materials are based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grants DUE 0087570 and DUE 0230913. The project, initiated in 2001, is directed by Marin S. Robinson (Northern Arizona University, Chemistry and Environmental Sciences) and co-directed by Fredricka L. Stoller (Northern Arizona University, English).  See the About Us page for other individuals involved in the project.

Write Like a Chemist has many novel features, including the following: 

• The development of Write Like a Chemist has resulted from a truly interdisciplinary effort; we, chemists and applied linguists, combined our areas of expertise with input from students, to create the approach and textbook.
   
• Tools from the field of corpus linguistics were used to gain a better understanding of the language of chemistry so that we could accurately represent the language in our materials. We created a 1.5 million-word database (i.e., corpus) of chemistry texts, representing journal articles and other types of chemistry writing.  We used this database to identify common, generalizable linguistic patterns in the language of chemistry, a task that would have been virtually impossible without the help of a computer. These patterns are introduced and explained throughout the textbook.
   
• The skills taught in Write Like a Chemist are research-specific writing skills. We initially entitled this project "Research-Inspired Writing," a name which emphasizes our desire to help students learn writing skills commensurate with their ever-growing research skills. Yet, we recognize that not every student using this textbook will be involved in a research project.  To this end, we developed canned research projects so that all students have a reality-based project, complete with data, to write about.

We welcome your suggestions and comments. Anyone interested in piloting materials during the 2005-2006 academic year should contact us.

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.