Scientific writing is one of the highest-leverage skills a researcher can develop, and it’s one of the least formally taught. Most PhD programs offer a seminar or two on grant writing and a cursory pass through manuscript structure. The rest you’re expected to absorb through revision cycles and whatever feedback your PI has time to give.
Online courses fill that gap — and the best ones are genuinely good. This post covers the courses I’d recommend for life scientists at different career stages: PhD students writing their first first-author paper, postdocs putting together fellowships and grants, and scientists in industry who need to write technical reports and regulatory documents clearly.
A note on scope: I’m focusing on scientific writing specifically — peer-reviewed manuscripts, grants, theses, and technical reports — rather than science communication for general audiences. There’s some overlap, but the skills and audiences are different enough to treat separately.
Best Overall: Writing in the Sciences (Stanford/Coursera)
Writing in the Sciences by Dr. Kristin Sainani at Stanford University has been one of the most consistently recommended scientific writing resources for years, and its reputation is well-earned. Sainani is a biostatistician who teaches with notable directness — the course spends real time on why scientific writing is frequently bad and what the specific habits are that make it bad.
The core of the course addresses what Sainani calls the “verb problem” in scientific writing: the tendency to bury actions in nouns, use passive voice indiscriminately, and write sentences that are technically correct but exhausting to read. This pattern is so deeply ingrained in scientific culture — from undergraduate training to peer review feedback that never questions prose quality — that researchers often don’t recognize it in their own writing until someone points it out explicitly.
What you’ll cover:
- Cutting clutter: nominalizations, unnecessary prepositional phrases, passive voice overuse
- Sentence and paragraph structure for scientific readers
- Writing effective results sections (with specific section guidance)
- Writing grant proposals (including specific NIH guidance)
- Reviewing and editing other people’s writing
- Peer review and the publication process from an editor’s perspective
The course is available on Coursera and can be audited free. The certificate option (with graded assignments and peer reviews) is available for a monthly Coursera fee. The graded assignments are actually worth doing: the course asks you to submit a writing sample for peer review, and the feedback from other course participants is often genuinely useful.
Who it’s for: This is the right starting point for almost anyone. PhD students writing their first paper, postdocs who have never formally studied scientific writing, and established scientists who suspect their writing has habits worth examining will all benefit.
Length: Approximately 8 weeks at 1-2 hours per week. The pacing is flexible and most people work through it faster.
Verdict: The best single course for foundational scientific writing. Start here.
Best for Grant Writing: Grant Writing for Scientists (Coursera/UC Davis)
Grant writing is a specific skill that shares roots with scientific writing but has its own conventions, audience psychology, and failure modes. A strong research paper and a strong grant proposal require different things from the same scientific content.
Grant writing courses from UC Davis and other institutions on Coursera cover NIH application structure, the significance/innovation/approach framework, specific aims strategy, and how reviewers score applications. NIH-specific content is particularly valuable for researchers in the US academic system, but the underlying principles — making your case clearly to non-specialists who are choosing between competing proposals — apply broadly.
If your primary near-term need is fellowship applications (NSF GRFP, NIH F31, Hertz), look specifically for courses that cover fellowship writing, which has some differences from R01-style grant writing. The audience for a fellowship application includes scientists outside your subfield, which changes the level of background you need to include.
Who it’s for: Graduate students applying for fellowships (NSF GRFP, NIH F31), postdocs pursuing F32 or K awards, and junior faculty preparing their first R01.
Verdict: A necessary supplement to general scientific writing training once you’re working on grant applications specifically. Pair with Writing in the Sciences for a complete foundation.
Best for Industry Scientists: Technical Writing Essentials
Scientists moving into biotech and pharma often find that their manuscript writing skills don’t directly transfer to technical reports, regulatory submissions, SOPs, and internal documentation — all of which are structured differently and written for different audiences.
Industry writing is often shorter, more structured, more explicitly formatted, and more explicitly action-oriented than academic writing. A methods section in a peer-reviewed paper looks different from a Standard Operating Procedure, and a grant aims page looks different from a regulatory briefing document.
Several platforms, including Coursera and Udemy, offer technical writing courses that address these formats. For biotech and pharma specifically, look for courses that address writing for regulatory submissions (INDs, NDAs, BLAs), clinical study report writing, SOP development, and internal scientific reports. The Society for Technical Communication (STC) and Regulatory Affairs Professionals Society (RAPS) both offer structured training in this area as well.
Who it’s for: Scientists transitioning from academic to industry roles, or researchers in industry who find their academic writing background doesn’t fully prepare them for technical document formats.
Verdict: The specific course matters less than whether it covers the document formats you’ll actually use. Ask your manager or colleagues what types of documents your role requires most, then find training specific to those formats.
Best for Non-Native English Writers: Academic English for Research
For researchers who completed undergraduate or graduate training in a non-English-speaking environment, scientific writing in English has an additional layer of challenge beyond the craft issues that affect all scientists. The phrasing conventions, idiomatic expressions, and sentence rhythms of published English-language science are learned through immersion that many non-native speakers simply haven’t had.
The Academic English: Writing Specialization on Coursera, offered by UC Irvine, covers grammar, sentence structure, essay writing, and the specific vocabulary patterns of academic English. It’s designed for non-native speakers and is more accessible than courses written for fluent English speakers who already know the conventions.
For researchers whose English proficiency is strong but who still feel that their prose doesn’t match the register of published work in their field, reading extensively in your target journals and actively studying how senior authors in your field write is also effective — and it’s free.
Who it’s for: Researchers for whom English is a second (or third) language and who are writing for international journals.
What to Look for in a Scientific Writing Course
Not all scientific writing courses are worth your time. Signs of a good course:
Specific, applied exercises. A course that teaches writing principles without asking you to apply them to your own scientific writing isn’t useful. The transfer to your actual work requires practice.
Honest about bad habits. Good courses identify the specific habits that make scientific writing poor — nominalizations, unnecessary passive voice, vague hedging, empty filler phrases like “it is important to note that.” Courses that treat these as advanced topics rather than core issues miss the point.
Feedback mechanisms. Peer review assignments, feedback from instructors, or at minimum detailed rubrics that help you self-assess. Writing feedback is how you improve; videos alone aren’t enough.
Scientific, not just generic. Courses designed for general business or technical writing don’t fully address the norms, expectations, and conventions of peer-reviewed scientific writing. Look for courses taught by or specifically designed for research scientists.
Signs of a course to avoid:
- “Step-by-step” promises that don’t acknowledge how writing depends on content and argument
- Courses without any writing assignments
- Content that’s primarily about academic integrity or plagiarism avoidance (useful topic, but not a writing course)
- No evidence of instructor expertise in scientific writing or the relevant field
Supplementing Coursework: Books Worth Reading
Formal courses get you the principles and feedback structure. The rest of the skill comes from deliberate practice and reading.
Read what you want to write. If you’re working on a Methods paper for Nature Methods, read 20 Methods papers in Nature Methods. Not to copy, but to internalize the rhythm and conventions of that specific format and journal.
Seek out line-level feedback. Most PIs give structural and scientific feedback on manuscripts; fewer give line-level prose feedback. If you can find a writing group, a labmate who writes clearly, or a formal writing center at your institution, seek out feedback on the actual sentences.
Two books worth keeping on your shelf:
The Scientist’s Guide to Writing by Stephen Heard is the book-length treatment of scientific writing I’d recommend most to graduate students. It covers structure, argument, style, and revision in more depth than any course can — and it’s written by an ecologist who clearly thought carefully about why scientific prose is the way it is, and what to do about it.
Scientific Writing and Communication by Angelika Hofmann is a more comprehensive reference covering manuscripts, grant proposals, abstracts, and presentations. It’s longer and more textbook-like than Heard’s book, but it covers a wider surface area of scientific communication.
Neither replaces course feedback, but both reward rereading at different career stages.
Bottom Line
Start with Writing in the Sciences on Coursera if you haven’t taken a formal scientific writing course. It’s the highest-value single course available online for most life scientists, and it addresses the habits that produce bad scientific writing rather than just describing what good writing looks like. It can be audited for free.
Add grant-specific training when you’re actively working on fellowship or grant applications — the conventions are different enough to warrant it. And if you’re transitioning to an industry role, invest specifically in technical writing training for the document formats your new role requires.