 I'll tell you where the writing tip idea came from. Part of it was I wanted to demonstrate to the students my commitment that writing is integral to the content. So my commitment was I'm going to forego a little bit of content to emphasize writing instruction because I still think writing will help them understand the concepts better. So even though I'm eliminating some content out of the course, I think what they are learning, they're learning better because they're forced to write about it. But I didn't want to take a lot of time away from my lecture. So I kind of use it as an icebreaker in the beginning of class. I'll start with the writing tip. The writing tip might be very simple. For example, a lot of the writing tips are flagged by me reading the reports. For example, a common error when students first start to write about data is they don't realize that the word data is plural. So they'll constantly see data is, right? Data was. So a writing tip might say, I just want to make you aware that data is plural. So you want to use data were, data are. That might be a writing tip. This takes a minute or two. Another writing tip might be about a sentence structure. Try to put the main point of a sentence first, first part of a sentence, rather than the last part of the sentence. The same holds true for a paragraph structure. Don't try to be a detective when you write. That is leave the reader trying to figure out what you're trying to say to the very last sentence of the paragraph. Start with the topic sentence and use that as the main theme of that particular paragraph. If you start distracting away from that theme, it means that you need another paragraph for a different topic. So that might be another writing tip. So a lot of the writing tips focus on, I would say, more the mechanics of the writing, the style of the writing, how to write concisely. Not so much on understanding that writing improves your understanding of science. So it's more on the mechanics. The number one writing tip I gave was which helped me revise my template. In my template, I give an example of how to construct a table. In the very first exercise, everybody was giving me these really poor tables. I wasn't again sure if it was because they did it the night before or because they weren't following the template or my template wasn't clear. So I spent a writing tip, this was a longer one, this probably took ten minutes, where I went through the table, the data that they actually analyzed, created the table for them, told them all what you have, how to construct the table, what the proper weight, what should go on the table, how the data should be arranged, with headers and footers, etc. And when I asked them about the writing tip a few weeks later to tell me about a writing tip, it was the table. The table made the more sense to them. So that made me go back and revise my template and put that element back into the template, because apparently it wasn't clear enough in the template. So that's another example of the writing tip. I actually got the idea from, I use a mathematical software called MathCAD, to do calculations and every time I open it up, there's a little window that pops up that says, MathCAD tip of the day. So that's where it flagged. I also wanted to use a writing tip to kind of keep a consistent dialogue of writing going throughout the quarter. I just didn't want to have the discrete times where we talked about, right, we only talked about writing when I handed back the reports. I wanted to keep a consistent dialogue, daily dialogue, keep them thinking about writing. It is important, it is important as the content, and but again, I didn't want to take away too much time from the content, so that's why I just started these quick writing tips of the day. So to just give them one, rather than summarizing all this writing into two or three lectures, let's just give them one little tip and see if that works and see if they hold on to that, see if it makes sense. And because of many times it reflects back on the reports that I've graded, they will incorporate those into their next report.