Writing Skills
Blas MOLA-YUDEGO
Writing academic works
Guidelines, proper structure and contents are important parts of your assignments along the courses and your final thesis. In this text there is some reflections about academic writing to give some ideas and method on structuring text. Writing is not easy, for anybody, and needs lots of thinking and revision. There is the saying that “a good text is a bad text reviewed”. There is no need to be perfectionist to the utmost detail, but texts, as any work, needs of discipline and self-demand, and you should set your own thresholds. Guidelines and conventions look very arbitraty at times, and at times they are indeed. But they must be followed when a text is presented, as in many times imply more than a simple set of capricious rules. But obviously is not only about presentation and forms, contents are the ultimate core of your work. [continue reading]
Objectives
- To review and discuss the principles of clear writing
- To compare and analyse different types of academic abstracts
- To be able to write own abstract and to give constructive criticism to peers
- To review how to conduct assignments following the principles of good scientific practice (ethics & plagiarism)
Tasks
Why are theses organised that way? Whats is your own writing style? What template would you follow when writing your first academic work? Structure your own thought on this.
Get familiar with the UEF Electronic plagiarism detection tool (Turnitin)
Read the UEF instructions on plagiarism
Wach the video: Beware of nominalizations (AKA zombie nouns) -Helen Sword [Video]
Get a 9 steps’ guide to plagiarism with examples [here]