Important Information About Our Instructor-Led Courses
Our courses are asynchronous, meaning you never need to be at your computer at any specific hour. Instructors provide guidance through forum discussions and feedback on assignments. More information about our courses and webinars is available here .
Registration is limited to 29 students. If the course is full, you may join the waitlist to be notified if seats open up. If these dates don’t work for you, or if no seats are available, you can sign up to be notified when the next session of this course is open for registration.
Disparate elements come together to make a piece of science writing great. To make that magic happen, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Techniques developed in other fields of communication can be applied to science writing (and other media) to both educate and excite the reader without sacrificing accuracy or succumbing to sensationalism.
This six-week, intermediate-level class builds on the skills you learned in Developing Effective Science Communication: Beginning. Through lessons, forum discussions, and weekly assignments with instructor feedback, you’ll add to your science editing toolbox by borrowing from a variety of literary fields and genres, including rhetoric, horror, and humor.
Week 1 will cover controlling tone, pacing and reader attention, with a focus on tools from storytelling.
Week 2 will cover editing with an audience in mind, with a focus on tools from rhetoric.
Week 3 will cover editing for cohesion, with a focus on tools from academic editing and line editing.
Week 4 will cover working with a writer, with a focus on process and prioritization.
Week 5 will cover editing for impact, with a focus on lessons from humor and horror.
Week 6 will cover editing for meaning, with a focus on character and theme.
Homework assignments should take less than an hour to complete (with opportunities for additional practice). The class will use a forum for discussions of readings and will meet twice over Zoom. In all, you should expect to spend two to four hours a week on this course.
The class is designed for both experienced editors looking to refresh their skills with focused exercises and aspiring science editors looking to understand different aspects of editing. You might have a background in science, journalism, or institutional communication. Whether you edit science articles or work in other media such as audio and video, these techniques for conveying scientific information to a lay audience will be relevant and applicable. Copyediting and proofreading are separate skills that won’t be addressed in this course.
Students in Kathryn’s other classes say…
I particularly enjoyed Kathryn Jepsen’s facilitation of the material and feel she is an especially gifted communicator and presenter. —M.G.
Kathryn is an extremely knowledgable person and clearly has so much to share. I enjoyed learning about the ins and outs of scientific editing from her and the course was excellently structured and paced. —B.A.
Prerequisites
Students should have completed Developing Effective Science Communication: Beginning or have professional science editing or science communication experience.
Kathryn Jepsen (she/her) is the physics editor at Quanta, a magazine about mathematics, theoretical physics, theoretical computer science, and the basic life sciences. Before that, she served for more than a decade as editor-in-chief of Symmetry, an institutional publication about particle physics and astrophysics. She has a master’s degree in journalism, with a focus on science writing, from Northwestern University, and she has studied creative writing and the developmental editing of fiction.
Policies
Our website has detailed information on registration, accessibility, duration of access to course materials, and refunds. By participating in this course, you are agreeing to the EFA’s Online Community Code of Conduct and Anti-Harassment Policy .
