Scientific Skills Workshops

Course Description

One of the key characteristics of good scientific writing is clarity, which ensures for the most effective reporting of new findings in academic journals. To meet the standards of scientific publication, you need to communicate your ideas clearly, effectively and elegantly. Thus, the language you select should be as simple and well-ordered as possible in every sentence and every paragraph.

But how do we know when a text is written well? And why do some texts give the reader a better sense of flow and coherence?
In this seminar, you will learn techniques for writing good journal-style texts that meet the publication standards. We will look at a range of writing skills to practice and develop your writing techniques – techniques that help ensure clarity, conciseness and coherence.

To understand what good writing is, you also need to develop a better understanding of how readers read. Understanding how the brain assimilates written language helps to ensure that your writing can be read quickly and processed easily by your peers.
The training uses an interactive methodology that applies a range of activities and feedback. We will first focus on sentence-level activities that look at how to improve typical problems that make the reader’s job difficult. The seminar handout provides a comprehensive overview of the principles and techniques that contribute to good scientific writing.

Key content and skills development

• Ensure clarity and conciseness to keep texts simple
• Ensure cohesion – effective use of linking and structuring techniques
• Consider reader expectations to ensure improved understanding
• Develop arguments effectively
• Organising sentences and paragraphs
• Develop overall text coherence
• Use correct verb tenses and punctuation
• Use appropriate active and passive voices
• Create effective titles and abstracts

Preparation assignment

Prepare a mini article of your research, taking the form of an extended abstract. This text of about 500 – 600 words will be edited during the seminar. A specific framework will be sent per email 3 weeks before the seminar. Please also bring other examples of your writing so that we can apply the principles to your own work.

About the trainer

Tim Korver is a native speaker of English who has been living in Munich since 2002. He owns a language school where the focus lies teaching Communication Skills to business people as well as academic researchers. Apart from ‘Scientific Presentation’, he also runs workshops on ‘Scientific Writing’, ‘Effective argumentation’ and ‘Job Applications’ at a number of universities and scholarship programs across Germany. He attained his MA in Linguistics, which focused on language change in the scientific journal article. He has a strong interest in Rhetoric of Science, and regularly helps individuals to argue their ideas more effectively.