Advanced Writing for Astronomy

This course is a series of lectures aimed at senior PhD students in astronomy at Peking University. The focus of the course is on structure and logic of standard astronomy papers. The syllabus is here Everyone is welcome to use these notes and assignments, with attribution and please let me know. Please also let me know if you have any comments or suggestions!

Short seminar on paper writing (pdf)

Assignments for the course

Class 1 ppt pdf This course makes use of many online resources, includie the Purdue OWL, the Duke Graduate School Scientific Writing Resource, Lynne Hillenbrand's course at Caltech. The Purdue and Duke webpages are especially useful for grammar, which is useful and mostly beyond the scope of this course. The paper Common Mistakes in Writing Astronomy and Physics Literature in English by Shuang-Nan Zhang and Yun Xu is very useful and tailored to Chinese students. Good advice can also be found in How to write and develop your astronomy research paper by Knapen, Chamba, & Black.

In 2026, we are incorporating LLMs like ChatGPT into the course to explore how we can best use them in writing and editing.

Gregory Herczeg