Übung Academic Writing

The purpose of this course is to provide students with skills and tools to enhance their academic writing abilities. The structure of the course is tentatively provided as follows: The first session of the course provides an introduction to mind mapping and methods for presenting literature through examples and hands on activities. This is combined with an introduction to proper referencing and tools for reference organization. The first session concludes with the remaining time dedicated to targeting points for improvement identified from previously written works submitted by the students. The second session delves into more detail on the basics of scientific writing. This will focus on common issues of paragraph formation, sentence structure, and grammar. This part of the session will also be dedicated to follow up questions from students from the previous session especially regarding the identified points for improvement. The session continues with the structure of the report via a preliminary brainstorming activity where each student will be given time to attempt an outline of their report structure. This is to be revisited in later sessions. The final part of this session addresses how to formulate abstracts. This includes three activities: 1) identification of strong and weak characteristics from examples provided 2) a brainstorm activity for students to develop their own draft and 3) a peer review activity for the drafts the students create. The third session will revisit the structure and abstract draft activities to enable the students to review their progress from the earlier drafts. Given the amount of time between this and the previous session, it is assumed the students will have significant development in their report progress. The draft activities will be accompanied by peer review of both the abstract and structure revisions. Depending on interest, the remaining time in the session will entail discussion of methods for case study research with a focus on qualitative research techniques such as various types of interviews (including also discussion on preparation, implementation, and ideas for analysis and write up). The fourth session content will be open and determined by the students. This may include further discussion and elaboration of any of the content in the previous sessions. Any of the above may be subject to alteration depending on the needs identified and requested by the students. Raumplanung Technische Universität Dortmund SoSe 2013 Institut für Raumplanung M.Sc. Sprague Teresa M.Sc