Soft Skills Course:
Scientific Writing (2nd edition)
Date
8-9-20 October 2026
Organizer
Myriam Alcalay (IEO)
Location
IEO Campus, Via Adamello 16 - Milan
About the Course
High quality scientific writing is essential for a successful research career. Scientists need to develop the ability to write well-structured manuscripts to communicate their results. The course has been designed to help students understand the steps in scientific writing in different settings, including original manuscripts, thesis, and curriculum vitae, using practical examples and exercises.
Lessons Location: Gold Room
9:30 – 11:00
Principles of Effective Writing
– Reducing
– Using the active voice
– Writing with verbs
– Writing good sentences (parallelism)
– Writing good paragraphs
11:15 – 12:45
Grammar in Scientific English
– Common mistakes
– Punctuation
14:00 – 15:30
Exercises
– Multiple choice exercises
– Reducing
– Sentence rewrites
Lessons Location: Silver Room
9:30 – 11:30
Writing an original manuscript
– Organizing your work
– Format of original manuscripts
– Setting up a draft, revising
– How to write specific sections: Title, Abstract, Introduction, Methods, Results, Discussion
– Writing a Thesis
11:45 – 12:45
Plagiarism and Copyrights
– What constitutes plagiarism and how to avoid it
– AI in scientific writing: yes or no?
– The perils of paper mills
14:00 – 15:30
Abstract rewrite
– Students will re-write their abstract on the basis of what they learned and send it to myriam.alcalay@ieo.it
Lessons Location: Silver Room
9:30 – 11:00
Writing a good CV
11:15 – 13:00
Discussion of Abstracts before/after