The Northern Nevada Writing Project

The entire reason that I wanted to be a part of the writing project this summer was an epiphany I had. 

When I started college I had a hard time adjusting to scientific writing.  I had always been considered a good writer in high school.  It was really depressing for me, then, when I started college and all of the things that made me a good writer were now considered my “faults”: rich descriptions, deep vocabulary, and well-structured paragraphs (according in my high school teachers).

I desperately believed that I was meant to be a scientist, so I buckled down like a good little girl and proceeded to forget everything I had previously learned about writing and began following the scientific standard: concise, brief, no adjectives that can’t be quantified. 

When I became a teacher, I decided that I would be doing my students a favor if I taught them about writing the way I had learned it in college.  I didn’t want any of them to receive the same rude awakening that I had when I showed up in college.  So, I set out to create a procedure for writing scientifically. 

However, I found myself in middle school and in an effort to meet my student’s developmental level, I started creating projects that demonstrated creative writing techniques.  I of course never wanted to be really teaching them writing…but I really wanted to let my students incorporate something I knew they were good at with their scientific knowledge. 

Here’s the epiphany: why does science writing have to be boring? 

I have never gotten very involved with the writing process, however.  So, the book I looked at had several ideas for incorporating writing and reading into everyday science pedagogical methods.  Several of the techniques that I use already.  However, Lesley Wing Jan also promoted the idea of writing narratives of what students learn as they follow procedures of a lab.  Huh, what a concept.  She actually wrote, “Expressive and descriptive language must not be sacrificed for more precise scientific language”.  Her classes are younger than mine, but her idea is that students make connections to develop the concrete knowledge through the process of the narrative.  I’m feeling a little trepidatious about the whole thing, but I think I can do it…

So, my questions are: do I need to teach the narrative exactly like my Language Arts teacher does or can I develop my own technique?  Can I forgo my scientific lab reports for narratives as  part of data collection or should it be separate?  As a scientist, I like things to be pretty uniform…usually for each lab I do a write-up with data collection.  But could I start doing narratives instead in some instances or with demonstrations?