Academic Writing for Psychology

Valfri forskarutbildningskurs, 7,5 hp
Optional PhD course, 7.5 credits

The course syllabus below in PDF Pdf, 198 kB.

Kursplan/Course Syllabus

Course leader and examiner

Christine Fawcett

Goal

The student will gain skills for academic writing and publication, critiquing others’ writing, presenting their work at conferences, and will actively develop a manuscript they are currently working on.

Contents

This is a PhD course with approximately 350 pages literature, lectures, discussions, and homework assignments. The course is aimed at PhD students who are beginning to write a research manuscript. The course teaches a variety of skills related to presentation of research, with particular emphasis on writing and publishing. The subjects taught in the course include:

• Introduction to Writing
  • 58 pages
  • Bem (2004) Writing the Empirical Journal Article, p.185-216
  • Day (1998) How to Write and Publish a Scientific Paper
  • Hartley (2008) Academic Writing and Publishing, ch. 1.

• Structure of an academic paper
  • 62 pages
  • Hartley (2008) Academic Writing and Publishing, ch. 2.1-2.11
  • Hofmann (2010) Scientific Writing and Communcation, ch. 7

• Writing for non-native English speakers
  • 81 pages
  • Swales and Feak (2009) Academic writing for graduate students, Units 7-8
  • Hofmann (2010) Scientific Writing and Communcation, ch. 5

• Writing techniques and motivation
  • 59 pages
  • Bliss (2007) Managing Your Time
  • King (2000) On Writing
  • Lamott (1994) Bird by Bird
  • Skinner (1981) How to discover what you have to say

• Selecting journals for submission and the submission process
  • 15 pages
  • Hartley (2008) Academic Writing and Publishing, ch. 4.2
  • Hofmann (2010) Scientific Writing and Communcation, ch. 17

• Resubmissions and responding to reviewers’ critiques
  • 9 pages
  • Bem (2004) Writing the Emirical Journal Article, p.217-19
  • Hartley, Academic Writing and Publishing, ch. 2.12-2.13

• Critiquing others’ writing and reviewing papers
  • 15 pages
  • Hoppin (2002) How I Review a Scientific Article
  • Christiansen and Yokomizo (2010) How to Peer Review
  • Lee (2008) How to be a great reviewer: an editor’s view
  • Provenzale and Stanley (2005) A Systematic Guide to Reviewing a Manuscript

• Conference presentations
  • 43 pages
  • Hofmann (2010) Scientific Writing and Communcation, ch. 27-28

Teaching format

Class time will be divided between lectures and discussion of students’ manuscripts. In addition to course readings each week, students will work on their own manuscript outside of class as well as read and critique the manuscript of another student. Readings are concentrated toward the first weeks of the course so that students can focus more time on writing their own, and reading their classmates’ manuscripts in the later weeks.

Evaluation

The course leader will examine students’ progress on their own manuscripts at the end of the course as well as evaluating their weekly critiques of each others’ manuscripts.