This week I am teaching at Karolinska in the Applied Biomedical Communication and Professional Development course.  This is a popular course — 60 masters students again this year. It covers scientific writing, oral presentation skills, and career planning. 

In my workshop this week, the students learn to apply linguistic strategies for improved readability and flow in scientific manuscripts. Specifically, I cover:

• Creating a structure: introducing the CARS template
• What makes a text easy or hard to read? The top 3 essentials
• How long is a too long sentence?
• Top-heavy sentences: why English hates them
• Creating flow: the concept of topic-stress
• The topic sentence and why every paragraph wants one
• How to give feedback and why we do it