SCIENTIFIC WRITING

Accurate, understandable writing is one of the most important academic skills. Writing is a learned skill that takes persistence, training and confidence. In this course, we will start by discussing typical phases in the writing process and inherent problems. We will then analyse the following questions and practise in detail: How to define a topic and write an abstract; how to use clustering and mindmapping in order to structure ideas and arguments; how to structure the text according to the so-called IMRAD format of scientific papers. Questions of language and style will be discussed in detail and on the basis of examples both from published (or rejected) papers and from examples provided by course participants. We will also look at rules and tools for bibliographic references and the effective use of your word-processing programme when preparing longer texts, e. g. doctoral dissertations, journal articles, or book manuscripts.