300443 VO Science writing: abstracts and articles (2006W)

Scientists communicate in many different ways (textbooks, museum exhibits, interviews, ...) but in one sense the real job is to produce the articles and the summaries (abstracts) by which we communicate among ourselves and evaluate each other.
This course will "deconstruct" these two as if they were art forms, which, in a way, they are. We will read and analyze famous examples of successful articles (e.g., Watson and Crick, Nature, 1954) and also separate out the parts of good articles and abstracts to understand how they do what they are intended to do. The VO course will discuss other people's examples,
and the SE course will involve students writing abstracts or a short article of their own and also criticizing the writing of others.