Learning to write about chemistry

One of the things I’ve been interested in recently (especially now as I trawl through hundreds of exam scripts!) is how our students write; or more precisely, what opportunities we give our students to develop their writing skills. I’m currently reading the literature on this, and it turns out there is quite a lot of work done on the topic of student writing in chemistry.

First though: a question. How do we currently integrate academic writing into our curriculum? A common assignment is often to get students to summarise a scientific article in order to develop their writing skills. There is a useful resource on Learn Chemistry for this very purpose.¹ While these kind of assignments are well intentioned (I use them myself) they have, in my opinion, both practical and design flaws.

Michael Seery explores how we might include meaningful writing assignments in our curriculum and how we use lab reports.