Category: Workshops

Writing Course at Karolinska Institute 10-13 March 2025


by Terese Bergfors

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

European Medical Writers Association workshop coming up


by Terese Bergfors

The next EMWA workshop will be held  7- 9 November in Malmö Sweden. This is only a 7-hour train ride from Uppsala where I live, so of course I will be attending. I’ll take the night train from Stockholm. Luckily there are a few night trains still running in Sweden.

The workshops I signed up for are: Beyond simple editing, Medical communication, Using readability  tools to help edit biomedical research articles, and Clinical appraisal of medical literature. It was a difficult choice because there are over 30 workshops being offered.