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Here is a milestone based writing guide to help you craft that story of yours! 

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Our goal is to write about very Science and Technology in a language that anyone can understand. It can be difficult to know if you are being understood, so we divided the writing process into three easy steps that you can follow.

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Milestone1 - Outline

The outline will give us a bare-bones structure of the article we are writing. It is not just a list of the topics of each paragraph, but a description of the ideas we want to convey. This will vary a lot from one article to another, but a general outline will contain the following:

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• What is the main takeaway?

• Who is your audience?

• Why is this takeaway of any relevance to my audience?

• What are the important facts that my audience needs to know?

• What are some technical concepts that people would need to understand to get my point?

• A conclusion: This can be a call for action or an open question for the reader.

 

Milestone 2 - Paragraphs

Post your outline on the collaboration tab, once you have logged in as a member. We will then assign two peers who will read your outline and discuss with you what they understand, what they don't. This critique may help you get a clearer idea of what an audience not used to your research area gets out of your article. You can then use this feedback to put flesh on the skeleton, or simply put, start writing complete paragraphs.  

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Writing at length is more challenging, more so if you are trying to finish the article at once. To make things a bit easier, you can split the writing into three elements: ideas, grammar, and words. First, focus on the ideas. What you want to achieve in this milestone is to write down your ideas in simple sentences without worrying about grammar. Once you have done that, you can play around with the order to find the right flow. This exercise will help us identify difficult words early on. For example, before writing this paragraph, I wrote this:

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“Full paragraphs are hard to write. How can we break it down? Paragraphs are made of ideas, grammar and words. Put ideas first as simple sentences. Rearrange to find flow. Later, you can worry about grammar. This will help you identify and fight jargon early on. Give example.” 

 

An important aspect of this step is to check the flow of the individual paragraphs as much as the flow between paragraphs. You want to finish one paragraph with an idea that connects with the next one.

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Milestone 3 - Polished article

Now that we have our first draft that has been discussed and critiqued by your peers, you can polish the grammar and vocabulary of your awesome ideas.

 

Remember to use your peers to get feedback

At the end of each step, share your drafts with your peer group (assigned to you) and discuss in detail the structure, the flow, and most importantly, the message they take home after reading it. We want the writing process to be social and fun!