Syllabus
1. Principles of Scientific Writing: Coherence; Scholarly publishing, Writing cultures, Reasons and strategies for publishing research
2. Cohesion: Grammatical & Lexical Cohesion, Framing, Parallel Construction and Sequential Construction
3. Continuity: Eliminating Discontinuities and Logical Gaps, Providing Transition, Depth and Emphasis & Introducing Variety
4. Conciseness: Key conciseness strategies, Removing wordiness, Rephrasing awkward sentences & Fixing sentence fragments
5. Clarity: Avoiding Ambiguity, Multiple negatives & Jargon, Defining the unfamiliar, Striving for Simplicity, Placing dependent clauses in sentences
6. Precision: Word choice, Phrasing, Field-specific terms and conventions, Nomenclature
7. Accuracy: Semantic (Being forthright, Maintaining an objective point of view) and Stylistic (Maintaining formal tone, Avoiding overstatements)
8. Grammatical accuracy: Maintaining verb accuracy, Using sequences of tenses, Avoiding faulty comparisons
9. Rhetorical accuracy: Adhering to IMRAD structure, Avoiding reasoning errors, Presenting conclusions (rather than data from references) & Citing primary sources
10. The scientific paper: Catchy titles with active clauses, Effective Abstracts, Structured Introductions, Guidelines for M&M, Storyline in Results, Developed Discussions
11. Editing and proofreading: Drafting, Revising, Reverse outlining, Editing techniques, Developmental editing reports
12. Publication Ethics: Authorship, Plagiarism & Scientific misconduct
Annotation
The scientific writing course is designed for graduate students (MSc. and PhD) with an English B2 (≥ FCE, IELTS 5, BEC Vantage) level seeking to develop their scientific writing skills towards a research career.
Both frontal (lecture-style) and practical ("How-to") instruction with a bottom-up, genre-based approach will be used in two 90-minute weekly lessons (one lecture and one practical) for twelve weeks.
This course aims to develop effective written communication skills based on logical argumentation, thereby stimulating critical thinking and knowledge integration in the context of the scientific method.
Upon completing the course, students are expected to autonomously communicate research findings in adherence to the IMRAD structure, using several rhetorical and linguistic devices for presenting evidence and making claims while critically discussing results, and to improve their ability to identify important research problems, creatively gain new insights and project future applications of their research, as detailed in the syllabus.