Ateneo - UPO

The course is designed to provide students with an opportunity to improve their knowledge of the conventions of academic and scientific English.
The syllabus aims to cover some of the areas of scientific communication that students should master in order to successfully promote their research and write their thesis. Students will also get a chance to improve their academic English vocabulary and grammar.

The required book for the course is by Wallwork, Adrian, "English for Writing Research Papers". Please visit or call/write to LIBRERIA SCIENTIFICA UNIVERSITARIA RESCALLI (VIA DEI MILLE 1 D, 28100 Novara) at 0321613113/ scientificarescalli@gmail.com - the bookshop already has the books available.

Optional books (it's not necessary to buy those unless you want to)
R.E.Taylor (2011) Medical Writing. A Guide for Clinicians, Educators and Researchers, 2nd edition, Springer, Ney York
R.A.Day, N.Sakaduski (2011) Scientific English. A Guide for Scientists and Other Professionals. 3rd edition, Greenwood, Oxford.
J.D.Lester, J.D.Jester Jr (2015) Writing Research Papers. A Complete Guide. 15th edition. Pearson.
H.Glasman-Deal (2010) Science Research Writing for Non-Native Speakers of English. Imperial College Press, London.
A.Wallwork (2016) English for Academic Research: Grammar. Springer
U.Eco (2015) How to Write a Thesis. The MIT Press.
P.M.S. O’Brien, F.B. Pipkin (2017) Introduction to Research Methodology for Specialists and Trainees. 3rd edition. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

Learning the tools and communication conventions in the sciences provides multiple benefits to students. The course aims to teach the fundamentals of effective scientific writing from multiple perspectives. Instruction will focus primarily on the process of writing the thesis.

Students are expected to have at least a B2 level in English. The attendance recommendation for the course is 70% minimum.

Lectures: the lectures will provide theoretical guidelines and principles as well as practical examples from scientific texts and exercises to teach students how to apply the guidelines to their own work.

Please connect to the DIR page of the course

The exam will be computer-based and consist of various questions (multiple choice, true/false, fill-in, etc.). The questions will pertain to the course/lecture contents.

Each lesson will have the duration of 4 hours (2 university lessons).

Lesson 1
1 Introduction into scientific writing. Choosing your topic.
2 Structuring a Sentence: Word Order
3 Titles
Lesson 2
4 Abstracts
5 Structuring Paragraphs
6 Being Concise and Removing Redundancy
Lesson 3
7 Introduction and research proposal
8 Breaking Up Long Sentences
9 Avoiding Ambiguity, Repetition, and Vague Language
Lesson 4
10 Review of the Literature
11 Clarifying Who Did What
12 Plagiarism and Paraphrasing
Lesson 5
13 Methods
14 Highlighting Your Findings
15 Discussing Your Limitations
Lesson 6
16 Results
17 Discussion
17 Hedging and Criticizing
Lesson 7
19 Conclusions
20 The Final Check

By the end of the course, students are expected to have gained a good understand of the scientific writing principles applied to the work on their thesis.