Mastering Academic Writing In The Sciences : A ...
This book provides a comprehensive and coherent step-by-step guide to writing in scientific academic disciplines. It is an invaluable resource for those working on a PhD thesis, research paper, dissertation, or report. Writing these documents can be a long and arduous experience for students and their supervisors, and even for experienced researchers. However, this book can hold the key to success. Mapping the steps involved in the writing process - from acquiring and organizing sources of information, to revising early drafts, to proofreading the final product - it provides clear guidance on what to write and how best to write it.
Mastering Academic Writing in the Sciences : A ...
Marialuisa Aliotta is Professor of Experimental Nuclear Astrophysics at the University of Edinburgh, UK. Her research interests focus on the nuclear reactions in stars that produce the energy that makes them shine and contribute to the creation of all elements apart from primordial hydrogen and helium. To date, she has published over 80 refereed papers and offers highly popular workshops on academic writing at various Scottish Universities. She is also a keen mentor to PhD students and early career academics. For more information on her work, please visit www.academiclife.coachesconsole.com.
Skilled scientific or academic writing is of great importance to research communication and journal publication ultimately. The four fundamental sections of a scholarly manuscript are introduction, methods, results and discussion. The discussion serves to interpret and analyze the study results in view of the existing body of evidence. Moreover, it serves to transform the usually rigid numerical statistical data of the results section into practical and clinically utilizable information. A well-formulated discussion can provide readers with informed decisions on the validity of the results and their exact generalizability to the broader community. It can also isolate shortcomings of the existing literature. Despite the extensive growth in biomedical publications lately, little attention has been paid to the importance of medical writing in general and to the discussion section of a medical manuscript in specific. This applies to curricular education and medical literature. The implications of well-executed studies with important findings can go unnoticed if authors are less skilled at writing a comprehensive discussion and conclusion among other manuscript sections. I intended to convey the experience I have accumulated in authoring and peer-reviewing for leading society journals and supervising in-house academic theses and dissertations. The objective of this article was to help authors present and communicate their research findings methodically, efficiently and impartially. Orthopedic research was taken as a practical example.
Mastering Academic Writing in the Sciences provides a comprehensive and coherent step-by-step guide to writing in scientific academic disciplines, mapping the steps involved in the writing process: from acquiring and organizing sources of information, to revising and editing early drafts, to proofreading the final product. It is an invaluable resource for those writing a PhD thesis, research paper, dissertation, grant application, or report. Writing such documents can turn into a painful experience for both students and their supervisors, as well as for experienced researchers in any field. Mastering Academic Writing in the Sciences aims at easing that pain, by providing clear guidance on what to write and how to write it.
Watch this super quick video for five practical tips to help you excel at writing academically from Helen Coleman, author of Polish Your Academic Writing and Your Super Quick Guide to University.
Your aim with academic writing is to effectively communicate your thoughts and ideas to the intended reader. Who? Why? What? How? are four questions which must to be answered in an essay if you want your message to be clear.
How (structure and style): How you write refers to the way information is organised or structured and the way or style in which it is put together, and this may vary from one type of writing to another. All academic writing is formally structured in a recognisable style, and this must be consistent and appropriate for the particular type of writing. Nevertheless, each type of writing must comply with the academic standards set by most courses, which require a more or less formal style as well as accurate grammar, spelling and punctuation.
Mistakes in academic writing can be tricky to fix, and the best thing is to avoid making them in the first place! How? Read a free chapter from The Quick Fix Guide to Academic Writing highlighting the errors that students tend to make in their papers, what they mean and how to steer clear of them.
Perfect for anyone transitioning from undergraduate to postgraduate degrees, Mastering Academic Writing provides the skills, tips, and tricks you need to move beyond the basics of academic writing and meet the new expectations of further study.
The use of an intro 'story' to provide context for the skills is innovative and very practical. The development of the revised versions clarifies the decisions made, and why they have been made. The short dialogues between student and tutor are perhaps a little contrived, but they are purposeful and clear. I can definitely see that using this scaffolding in class, or guiding my students towards it, would be extremely helpful. I think this book provokes thought, and students would need to spend quite a lot of time to fully benefit from the many directions towards revisions in writing, addressing different issues each time. For this reason, I would think carefully about who to recommend this to - some of our foundation students are returning to education after many years, and I can think of many of them who would see this text as a very good insight into the mystery world of academic writing, whereas some of our younger students may see it as a bit of a chore and would prefer quicker fixes.
Overall, I think this is a fresh way to help my students de-mystify the writing process and to develop their academic writing. I've added it to the list of recommended books for both the Academic Practice module and the Extended Research Project, not just for Business but for all of our routes.
This article has been written by Dr. Marialuisa Aliotta and originally published on her blog. About the author: Dr. Marialuisa Aliotta is a Reader in the Nuclear Astrophysics at the University of Edinburgh. She is also a mentor to young academics helping them to master the skill of academic writing. Marialuisa shares writing strategies and inspiration in her blog Academic Life at
Some years ago I attended a workshop on academic writing at the University of Edinburgh. To be honest with you, I do not remember much about it. But at some point the instructor said something that really resonated with me.
Academic Writing: Mastering Citation and Referencing is the latest publication from Prosperity Education. The book is aimed at learners on pre-sessional university courses, who are looking for a clear introduction to academic writing skills. The resource is suited to self-study, but may also be used by teachers/lecturers who run academic writing courses. The author of this book is Paul Murphy, an EAP specialist at Mahidol University, who has extensive experience of training learners in academic writing.
While the book does focus a lot on citation and referencing (as you would expect!), it also covers more general aspects of academic writing. For example, tasks like planning a discursive essay, complete the essay, evaluating sources, and summarizing are more generally useful, and are more than just a vehicle to practise referencing and citation.
The article is devoted to the issue of developing writing skills in academic and scientific communication spheres at university levels, both graduate and postgraduate. To teach academic/scientific writing effectively the authors propose to consider forming and developing genre competence of graduate and postgraduate students in scientific communication sphere to be an important component of the methodology aimed at teaching written scientific genres and their varieties. Based on cognitive, discursive and genre approaches the notion and structural components of genre competence in scientific communication sphere are developed. The use of the intergenre model of scientific text is believed to be an effective learning tool for mastering written scientific genres. The integrated course designed in accordance with the principle of comparative learning and teaching, the principle of bilingual learning, the principle of interdisciplinary and integrated learning and teaching, and aimed at developing writing skills in Russian and English is considered as a cornerstone component of effective teaching academic/scientific writing at a university.Keywords: Academic writingwritten scientific genresgenre competenceintergenre modelintegrated course
Modern scientific communication sphere is characterized by a great variety of genres, both oral and written ones. Structural-typological and compositional-semantic features of scientific texts, academic genres models of essay, abstract, coursework, theses, article can be found in any subject area and are relevant for developing communicative skills of students in scientific and professional spheres. Russian students come across these features starting from high school to university levels: graduate and postgraduate. They should know written and oral scientific genres, be able to abstract and summarize texts on their subject area, write secondary and primary abstracts, prepare reports, presentations, be able to write research papers in their subject area, etc. Being a literary style, functional scientific style is mainly realized in the written form used for storing and transmitting scientific knowledge. Mastering a logical, holistic and coherent speech is more important for writing than for speaking (Passov, 2015). Moreover, communicatively significant for students oral genres, e.g. report, presentation at a seminar or conference, participation in scientific discussion, have language, structural and context characteristics close to written genres (Dobrovolskaya, 2002). Having a rich, versatile didactic and methodological potential, writing plays crucial role in the language education (Mazunova, 2005). Besides, in western universities writing is recognized as a fundamental set of competencies in terms of higher education as a whole (Korotkina, 2018a). So, well-developed writing skills enable students to succeed in research and integrate into international scientific community. Thus, mastering written scientific genres can be considered as a prerequisite of developing writing skills which, in their turn, are a cornerstone of a complex personality ability to successfully communicate both, in the native and foreign languages in academic, scientific and professional spheres.] 041b061a72