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Course description

This eight-week E-learning course covers all basic skills and topics of the writing process, structure, and style of a scientific paper. We pay special attention to the writing process: how to start, how to select and organize your content, how to overcome writer’s block, how to arrange a coherent line of thought.

Learning objectives

During this course, you will develop an eye for text structure, cohesion, clarity, and conciseness, but - most of all - you will gain confidence in writing.

The learning route in this course follows a logical writing path. By walking this path during the course, you can work on several sections of your paper, while putting into practice the tips and tricks offered in the course. It is not required to be working on a paper at the start of the course, but you may choose to relate some of the assignments to your own writing if you are. You may also submit a draft - or part of your manuscript, in any stage - for discussion and feedback.

Instructional method

You are trained through short web lectures, various materials, exercises, and feedback from trainer and peers. This E-learning program is 100% asynchronous, so there are no real-time web sessions, but there is a lot of interaction at the discussion platform. We work in a group of 12 participants at a Moodle Platform with weekly deadlines. The study time is 3–4 hours per week.

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

To take part, you need to buy the book by Adrian Wallwork: English for writing research papers, 2^nd edition, Springer 2016, ISBN 978-3-319-26092-1. (DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-26094-5) 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 been training Graduate School of Life Sciences PhD candidates face to face since 2015. Several resources of the course are available .

Group size

10 to 12 participants

Number of credits

1.5 EC

Course schedule

Starting October 26, 2020, every week one new session will be online for you to follow, up until December 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)!