Anahita Vieira, Ph.D.

The Personal Statement

The personal statement is one of my favorite documents to help with—and for many prospective candidates, it's the hardest one to tackle.

How do you strike the right balance between presenting yourself as the ideal candidate for the program without bragging? How do you choose what personal details you should (or shouldn't) include? What if you have a messy personal narrative? How many (and how much) of your research experiences should you write about?

In this workshop, we'll answer all these questions and then some. We'll use generative writing exercises to get words on the page and we'll review the critical components that make up a strong personal statement.

Grant Proposal Writing

Although each grant has its own requirements, all grants are persuasive documents written with the same end goal in mind: obtain funding.

In this two-part workshop, we'll review the writing elements that make up all successful grant applications, discuss the most common writing pitfalls, and review Randy Olson's powerful ABT approach. The second half of the workshop will focus on the components of the specific grant type you'd like to go over (R, K, F, and T-series NIH grants; NSF-style grants; private foundation grants).

Participants will be given the opportunity to apply their newfound skills in real time by revising text (using their own or with a provided sample).

On Writing Clear Sentences

Everyone has the capacity to learn how to write clearly. The problem is, many of us weren't taught how to do so in an intuitive way. The problem is further compounded in academic settings where the writing contains abstract and complex ideas. But there's no need to perpetuate incomprehensible styles of academic writing (see: academese).

In this interactive workshop, we'll discuss the importance of writing for your reader. We'll explore the nature of human expectation and review fundamental sentence-level considerations to ensure clear writing.

Participants will be invited to bring a work-in-progress (a manuscript, fellowship application, grant proposal, etc.) to workshop.

Words & Pictures *

Illustrations and figures are a key part of telling a clear science story. Over the years, it has become clear to me that the very principles I use to guide my science writing are the ones that scientific designers and illustrators use in their work. Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words and, sometimes, a sentence will communicate more effectively than a figure. Often, they work well together to communicate the same point using different mediums.

In this workshop (co-led with Mary O'Reilly), we will explore how Randy Olson's ABT approach can be applied to figures and we'll discuss what key elements are shared between words and pictures.

Participants will be invited to bring a work-in-progress (a manuscript, fellowship application, grant proposal, etc.) to workshop.

*Please Note: This workshop requires a 2-3 month notice