Course Details

Academic Writing

Academic Year 2024/25

VYA002 course is not part of any programme in the faculty

Course Guarantor

Roger Turland, BA.

Institute

Institute of Social Sciences

Language of instruction

Czech

Credits

2 credits

Semester

summer

Forms and criteria of assessment

course-unit credit

Offered to foreign students

Not to offer

Basic Literature

Academic Skills, Terry Wilson, London: Pearson Longman, 2006 (en)

Course on BUT site

https://www.vut.cz/en/students/courses/detail/284829

Exercise

13 weeks, 2 hours/week, compulsory

Syllabus

  • 1. CHARACTERISTICS AND TYPES OF ACADEMIC TEXTS: Students’ experience with academic writing – characteristics and genres of academic writing – register and style – abbreviations, initialisms and acronyms
  • 2. RESEARCH ARTICLES: FORMAT + WRITING PROCESS: Format of typical research articles – the process of writing articles – phrases for defining – relative clauses
  • 3. THE INTRODUCTION: Characteristics of an Introduction section – past simple vs present perfect simple – phrases for classifying – phrases for describing cause and effect
  • 4. THE LITERATURE REVIEW: Characteristics of a literature review – phrases for being critical – phrases for giving examples – referencing, quoting and paraphrasing
  • 5. VOCABULARY AND SPELLING: Academic vocabulary – confusable words – UK vs US English – dictionaries and corpora
  • 6. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Characteristics of a Materials and Methods section – the passive voice – passive vs active in research articles
  • 7. RESULTS: Characteristics of a Results section – phrases for describing trends – visuals – phrases for comparing and contrasting
  • 8. COHERENCE AND LINKING: Giving a text coherence and clarity – summarizing and previewing sections – linking words and when not to use them – avoiding vagueness and confusion
  • 9. DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: Characteristics of Discussion and Conclusion sections – phrases for describing quantities – modal verbs for deduction – hedging
  • 10. TITLES AND HEADINGS: Titles, headings and subheadings – capitalization – the definite and indefinite article
  • 11. ABSTRACTS: Characteristics of an abstract – conciseness (avoiding wordiness) – gerunds vs infinitives
  • 12. REVISING AND EDITING: Revising and editing – punctuation – subject-verb agreement