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Course description

This eight-week course covers all basic skills and topics of the writing process, structure and style of a scientific paper. During the training, the primary focus lies on the writing process of a paper and on the linguistics of academic writing: structure, cohesion and style.

Learning objectives

This course offers practical guidelines for a successful approach of your (future) writing task. We will pay special attention to the problems of the beginning writer: how to start, how to determine what you have to say, how to overcome writing blocks, how to compose a coherent line of thought? During this course you will learn about the process of writing a scientific paper and the criteria it should meet. You will learn how to design, write, analyse and edit a scientific paper with an eye for cohesion, clarity and conciseness and gain confidence in writing.

Instructional method

You are trained through short web lectures as well as through feedback from the trainer and your peers through the Elevate Platform. It is not mandatory for participants to be writing an article at the time of the course, but if you wish, you may submit a draft for discussion and feedback. Every week you have to work on assignments (about 4-5 hours a week) that you need to submit before the new week (learning unit) starts.

The course consists of 8 learning units, spread over 8 weeks:

1. Basics of scientific writing
2. Building an introduction and a discussion
3. Paragraph structure: topic and key sentences
4. Textual cohesion and emphasis
5. Results: tables and figures
6. Academic style 1: sentence length and the passive voice
7. Academic style 2: noun style, concision, hedging and boosting
8. Revising your article: verb tenses, pitfalls of scientific English, punctuation

Important

This course will be coordinated by Elevate Health. To take part, you need to buy the book by Adrian Wallwork: English for writing research papers, Springer 2011, ISBN 978-1-4419-7922-3. Price: € 26,01 The book is also available as a download from the Online Library of the Utrecht ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ.

Trainer

You will be trained by Annemarie van der Zeeuw (). Annemarie has ample experience in teaching science writing and has been training Graduate School of Life Sciences PhD candidates face to face since 2015. As from April 2017 her science writing course 'Writing a Scientific Paper' is available online as well. Several resources of this course are available .

Group size

10 to 12 participants

Number of credits

1.5 EC

Course schedule

Starting July 27, 2020, every week one new session will be online for you to follow, up until September 21, 2020. 
You are free to decide what time in the week you will complete the learning unit.

Course certificate

You will receive a course certificate after completing all seven learning units and being an active participant on the online platform.

Course fee

Course fee internal PhD candidates: â‚¬0.
Course fee academic staff UU/UMC: â‚¬585.
Course fee external participants (if space permits): â‚¬980.

‘Internal PhD candidates’ include:

• PhD candidates registered to the Graduate School of Life Sciences of Utrecht ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ via Hora Est/MyPhD

‘Academic staff UU/UMC’ include:

• PhD candidates of Utrecht ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ, not registered to the Graduate School of Life Sciences via Hora Est/MyPhD; 
• Postdocs employed by the Utrecht ľ¹Ï¸£ÀûÓ°ÊÓ or UMC Utrecht;
• Other academic staff employed at the UU/UMC

‘External participants' include:

• all other participants

Cancellation/no-show

You may cancel your application free of charge up to four weeks before the start of the course. If you cancel your application within four weeks before the start or if you do not meet the attendance requirements of the course, you(r department/research group) will be charged a no-show fee (€295 for this course). Unfortunately we cannot make any exceptions to this policy.

From the beginning the online course Writing a Scientific Paper is rated with an 8+ (out of 10)!