incubator approach to teaching writing skills and enhancing research outputs

The journal article incubator approach to teaching writing skills to researchers and academics involves a series of engaging and inclusive workshops in which best practice writing, reviewing and rewriting skills are modelled by the presenters and practiced by the participants. This paper describes the design and operation of two incubator workshops conducted recently in Australia and South Africa as well as some earlier workshops in Thailand and Vietnam. These are set in the context of a review of literature drawn principally from published journal articles on writing for peer-reviewed journals. There are three stages to the incubator process, learning about journal article writing and publishing, critiquing the writing of previously published works including critiquing the draft manuscripts of workshop participants, and having participants write their own complete journal article manuscript. Each stage is described and evaluated in detail with the discussion providing the feedback from participants in the incubator workshops carried out by the authors to date. Overall there are many benefits to the incubator approach for teaching writing skills including developing collegiality and relationship building within faculties, increasing exposure of individuals to the research work of others, developing confidence and writing skills for less experienced authors and academics, inspiring academic researchers to be more creative in their writing, and modelling and prioritising effective writing practices as an academic activity. Finally the incubator approach enhances research outputs with respect to publishing whilst at the same time being an effective teaching and learning approach for enhancing academic writing skills.