As a first-year PhD student, I had little experience in scientific writing and often felt lost when trying to structure my texts. I didn’t know where to start, which made the writing process overwhelming.
The Scientific Writing Pro course changed that! Martina’s enthusiasm for the topic was truly motivating, and her structured approach made everything so much clearer. I learned how to get into writing more easily, how to structure each part of a scientific paper effectively, and how small details can significantly improve clarity and readability.
This course gave me the tools to tackle scientific writing more confidently. I’d highly recommend it to anyone involved in research—especially beginners who want to build strong writing skills from the start. But even experienced writers will benefit from Martina’s knowledge and passion for the subject!

As a younger medium-aged scientist, I sincerely wish I had this kind of a course years ago, when I had to figure out how to write papers. All I had then were random papers from the field I started to work in. Not just that I did not know the topic well, I could not know if the papers were well written or not. However, I developed my way of writing, which is “by the feeling” how it should be.

Luckily I found a course which was promising in the Facebook ad that there would be no pain in writing scientific papers anymore. I literally hated writing the introduction part, so I gave the course a go. Namely, I had nothing to lose.

Besides systematic lectures about articles, paragraph and sentence structure, I got the knowledge of how to “train my brain by my brain” and create habits. Now I have no problem starting writing anymore. If I notice an issue, I bypass it by creating a graphical abstract to clear the picture in my mind. This is what I learned in this course too, i.e., that I am an “extremely” top-down writer, but now better equipped to deal with the negative side of the “top-down”. I can no longer imagine a day when I would not write. It would feel wrong like something is missing.

I always despised the idea of writing a review paper, but after this course, I was able to write it with ease and very fast. Even if the course was not dealing with this type of paper particularly. It is a review paper about the development of “my” field which is celebrating 10 years in Slovenia. The draft took me only four days; I finished with 17 pages containing only one sketch. This is something I would never believe I could do.

During the course, I finished writing an original paper that got accepted in one of the best journals in the field, and with a very high impact factor for the field. I knew that the results were good and that there is a contribution to science, but without the “writing scientist” course I would not even consider submitting to a journal labelled “A’’. So besides getting equipped, I also got much more confidence overall regarding writing scientific papers. Of course, there will always be something to improve, but I am now writing paragraph after paragraph with ease and joy, as promised in the advert on Facebook.

The course is systematically structured, very clear and easy to understand. I really enjoyed it and have already recommended it further to my colleagues. This course should be a mandatory class for all students at the beginning of their career or at least the last year of their BsC. I am really grateful for the knowledge!

I believe you can always perform better if you learn something new and there are many ways to sharpen even already rather well developed skills. My challenge was efficiency, I wanted to write more efficiently (regarding time spent) and with less pain.

I expected that during the course I will finish some of my papers I have been struggling with and will be inspired to start new manuscripts with more “easy-going” attitude, like – this is fun, not pain.

And, indeed, my expectations were met: first it was difficult, but I had to admit to myself – yes, actually I am procrastinating too much and there is a way to fight it. I have also learned to analyse my own and texts written by others in a more constructive and meaningful way.

I really liked the possibility to take the course in my own time, what is most convenient for me, thanks to the recorded videos. I am not sure if I would manage without this option. Time flies and everyday schedules are rather busy for all of us.

After the course, I see a long-term improvement: I already tried to write articles according to prescriptions given during this course (the content of the introduction, results, conclusions, sentence, paragraph structure etc) and I like how it works, I think this is what I am going to use in future as well. I have also developed my own everyday writing routine.

I would recommend this course to beginners (early PhD for instance) who don’t know how to start or how to do it better and for the experienced (postdoctoral) researchers who have a feeling it is too much struggle and could be done better and would like to get information and hands-on ‘know-how’.

Inta
PostDoc in biology