While publishing SCI journal papers is overemphasized in the academic community in Taiwan, the importance of scientific writing itself has been underestimated in most graduate programs in engineering departments. Most courses are designed for graduate students to gain general background knowledge and experimental skills, whereas there is seldom a chance for the students to learn how to deliver their findings and innovations in term of scientific papers. Consequently, most of students lack capabilities of writing good scientific papers and only present kinds of superficial works as compared to those in the advanced countries unless the manuscripts are prepared by their skillful supervisors. Such a problem does not come from the language gap, since the qualities of the theses written in our own language are also declining in the recent years. Pursuing the rapid growth in quantities of SCI publications and not valuing the importance of writing are two of the major causes of the urgent, ubiquitous crisis in our graduation education. In fact, writing is an indispensible part of research. Writing enables a researcher to examine the novelty, prior arts, methods, evidences, and merits of his or her own research and is the only way to spread the research outcome to the public. Only good and inspiring scientific writing exerts wide influence and brings impact (not impact factor). To play influence worldwide, the writing, of course, should be done in English. By considering the aforementioned reasons, this course is designed to systematically introduce how to write a quality scientific paper in English. The students will learn how to write correctly, efficiently, and effectively. It is believed that the course will not only help students to publish good papers but also encourage students to contribute quality research works. This is particularly beneficial for an interdisciplinary, leader-incubating program like what we provide in this department.

General schedule of a class:

14:00 Start of the class;
14:00-14:10 Review of the last topic;
14:10-14:50 Unit 1: Conceptual part of scientific writing;
14:50-15:00 Break
15:00-15:40 Unit 2: Technical part of scientific writing;
15:40-16:00 Quiz and Break
16:00-16:30 Unit 3-1: Group Activity - Practice/Presentation of scientific writing;
16:30-16:50 Unit 3-2: Group Activity - Troubleshootings plus Q&A;
16:50 End of the class.