Home > MU Writers

Featured Student Writing at MU

Undergraduate Writing in the Sciences

Too often, instruction in the sciences and practice in writing go unmixed in the classroom. This is partly due to prevailing myths about where the foci of writing instruction belong, and partly due to basic pressures of teaching and research loads on instructors. Consequently, instructors in the sciences tend to communicate and test students on conceptual knowledge through traditional methods of in-class testing, laboratory designs and short quizzes. However, despite the difficulties of incoporating intensive writing practice in the sciences, instructors and departments that do so are providing substantial benefits to their undergraduates.

Dr. Peter Motavalli, associate professor of Plant Sciences at MU, has fostered publication of undergraduate writing in his courses for several years. In the introduction to his website Nutrient News, which showcases the undergraduate writing emerging from his Plant Sciences 4313/7313 course, he notes that:

Effective communication of technical information to a diverse audience is a growing part of many careers, including soil science.  Science-based professionals may write for a variety of formats, including technical reports and memorandums, fact sheets, scientific and non-scientific journal articles, project proposals, posters and, increasingly more important, text for the World-Wide Web and other media.  In a recent survey conducted by the MU Campus Writing Program of former MU science and non-science undergraduates, over 79% of those students agreed that writing was very important to their jobs.

Dr. Motavalli demonstrates his commitment to meeting these needs with another publication, Soils and the Environment--an online annual release showcasing undergraduate talent in writing, editing and designing in several areas of environmental science. Both websites are a credit to Dr. Motavalli himself, but, more importantly, they are a credit to his undergraduates. Moreover, they serve as fine examples of what is possible in teaching undergraduates course concepts while coaxing them out of their comfort zones to write, at once giving them valuable skills for future careers as well as opportunities to produce meaningful, quality work in their undergraduate years.