Writing Workshops to Foster Written Communication Skills in Statistics Graduate Students

Abstract

Abstract Being able to communicate effectively is an essential skill for statisticians and data scientists. Despite this, communication skills are not frequently taught or emphasized in statistics and data science courses. In this article, we describe a series of four workshops that were developed to enhance the written communication skills of statistics graduate students. We also present results of a survey administered prior to the first workshop and after the last workshop to assess changes in attitudes towards writing and obtain student feedback to improve the workshops. Lastly, we discuss potential modifications of these workshops including ways to use these workshops or elements from them for undergraduates or in statistics and data science courses. Supplementary materials for this article are available online.