I discovered Coursera a couple of weeks ago, thanks to a conversation with a friend who is retired, but mentioned that he’d been taking a free course on model thinking from the University of Michigan. I looked up the organisation and noticed that a science writing course was starting shortly. I signed up for it, mainly to see how someone else teaches this topic.
So far, I’ve watched the first 6 lectures online and done one piece of homework. I liked the lectures, particularly the language used to describe the process of editing (e.g. a lot of focus on removing ‘clutter’). The homework was a bit frustrating because the computer assigns a mark of zero if there is any deviation from the ‘correct’ answer. It’s easy to respond correctly if the question involves a one-word answer (e.g. replacing ‘utilize’ with ‘use’). However, when revising a whole sentence, it’s almost impossible to exactly match the model answer.