Scientific Writing

Teacher(s)

Simon Anne-Catherine;

Language

French

Prerequisites

/

Main themes

This seminar will be composed of approximately five sessions in limited groups, spread over the academic year. In between, breaks will allow the students to prepare their individual papers. The seminar will deal with the epistemological, methodological and writing requirements that are expected in academic texts. More specifically, during the collective sessions the lecturer will provide the theoretical and practical instructions to the students in order to write an abstract, a summary of an existing scientific article and an innovative personal scientific article. The latter will generally be based on previous work realized for the master thesis.

Learning outcomes

At the end of this learning unit, the student is able to :
1	The main objective of this course is to acquire sound competences in the field of academic writing. At the end of the seminar, the student should be able to write: - an abstract - a scientific article (of about 12 pages) that could be submitted to an academic journal. Therefore, the student will have to acquire the rules and style specific to these types of academic discourse, to be able to summarize the state of the art of the topic and to provide a critical analysis of the subject.

Content

Acquisition of academic writing skills by working particularly on three types of scientific discourse: the proposal for a conference paper (and its peer review); the article abstract; the scientific article.

Teaching methods

• Interactive work sessions around the studied academic genres (communication proposal, abstract, scientific article).
• Personal work at home (readings or writing tasks) between each session, according to the established schedule.
• Presentation of the work done during the session.
• Peer and teacher evaluation; suggestions for improvement.

Evaluation methods

The evaluation at the January session will focus on active participation in the working sessions and on all the texts that will have been written and revised by the student. In the September session, the evaluation is limited to the writing of a scientific article.

Other information

Material:
The student will be provided a methodological vademecum with the instructions on the academic writing and examples of articles.

Online resources

Moodle: https://moodle.uclouvain.be/course/view.php?id=3315

Teaching materials

• L'ensemble des supports sont disponibles sur Moodle.

Faculty or entity

ELAL