Scientific Skills Workshops

The Berlin School of Economics is pleased to offer a workshop on writing good texts for academic journals. It is designed for all doctoral students and researchers at the BSE who would like to improve their English writing skills. The training will provide practice and guidelines for improving your writing technique to help ensure clarity, conciseness and coherence. We hired an excellent coach who is a native English speaker.

For many young scientists writing articles for academic journals is the most difficult part of research work. Poor structure, breakneck formulations and unclear argumentation lead to texts which are not too user friendly. However, for the success of academics it is essential that the content is successfully conveyed to the relevant target groups – from the subject community to the wider public.

The methods and instruments of scientific writing can be learnt. With a few select mechanisms for structuring and techniques for building arguments, it becomes possible to articulate even complex data clearly and comprehensibly. Coherently built up and convincingly formulated, even academic texts can be an exciting read!

In this workshop the process of academic writing is highlighted from the first idea through the structuring and formation of the text to its completion. The participants engage with the content related, formal and organisational aspects of writing and train their text competency with exercises. The following topics are covered:

1. Abstract, article, thesis: Text types and reasons for writing in academia
2. From idea to text: Topic selection, structure, argumentation
3. Rummaging, digging, serving it hot: Research strategies
4. Writing as a process: Utilising creative bursts – avoiding blocks
5. The eye reads too: Convention and form
6. Academic writing: My next steps

Professor Dr.-Ing. Bartlett Warren-Kretzschmar, Hanover and Logan, USA, was born in New York and studied Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at Cornell University. She has been teaching courses in landscape architecture and environmental planning at both American and German universities for the past twenty-five years. She was a guest professor in the international Master of Landscape Architecture programme at the Anhalt University of Applied Sciences in Bernburg, where she also offered courses in research skills and scientific writing, as well as communication and rhetoric. Presently she is the coordinator of the Bioregional Planning programme at Utah State University, USA.