Academic Writing: Effective Strategies for Publishing in English

Responsible person

Frank Lauterbach

Language

English

Workload

30 h attendance time
30 h self-study time

Credits

2

Schedule

18^th and 19^th February,
4^th and 5^th March 2027

9:30 - 17:30

Location

FSR 5.1
Büsgenweg 5

Number of students

16

Registration

Please send an email until 24.01.2027 to Olga Koktysh

Are you planning to write a paper or dissertation and are asking yourself how to best go about it? Or, have you started writing, but are unsure how to most effectively bring across your ideas and findings? Or, have you finished a draft and are wondering how to properlypolish it for publication?

If these or similar situations sound familiar to you, this workshop is for you. You will learn how to best express yourself adequately, what criteria a well-written academic paper in English needs to fulfill, and how you can manage the writing and publication process most productively.

Together, we will discuss important requirements for developing powerful English sentences, paragraphs, and texts that meet the expectations of readers, reviewers, and editors alike. For that, we are going to work closely with your own work in progress in order to practice how to effectively organize the writing process and how to successfully prepare your papers for publication. You will also get the opportunity to receive both peer and expert feedback on one of your own pieces of academic writing (see below).

Workshop Content: Concretely, you will learn how to:

• communicate professionally in English as an academic writer;
• organize your writing process efficiently;
• get started with writing your text;
• define the focus and objective of your research paper or dissertation;
• adequately structure paper (and dissertation) introductions;
• develop your research paper (or dissertation) and its individual sections;
• achieve coherence in your writing;
• present and discuss your findings;
• create powerful abstracts;
• draft well-focused paragraphs;
• apply the stylistic conventions of academic writing to your texts;
• write clear and concise sentences in English;
• connect sentences and link ideas to make your text flow well;
• understand how Large Language Models (LLMs) such as as ChatGPT or Claude function and what that means for using them;
• devise useful promts for the use of LLMs;
• evaluate text produced by an LLM;
• overcome potential obstacles or anxieties throughout your writing process.

Requirements: To participate in the workshop, you need to register for the course through the GFA and, after having been accepted into the course, submit one (and only one!) writing sample of yours to the course instructor. This can be a draft of a paper or a part of it (such as an introduction, abstract, etc.). You do not need to have a finished version yet; drafts at any stage of the writing process are perfectly fine.
Please mail your text as a Word-file to Frank Lauterbach (frank.lauterbach@posteo.de) at least one week before the first workshop meeting (i.e., by Thursday, 11^th February 2027). Appropriate sections for discussion will then be distributed to the other course participants. Please note that you should submit a text only after your course registration has been confirmed by the GFA! The course instructor is not in charge of the registration process.

To be eligible for credits (2 ECTS), you need to:

1. email the instructor a piece of your academic writing before the workshop (as explained above);
2. be continuously present on all four days of the workshop and participate actively in class;
3. provide some of your peers with short written feedback on selected aspects of their writing (in small groups);
4. submit a written reflection after the workshop in which you outline how the course in general and the discussion of your work in particular have helped you rethink and improve your writing.

Admission requirements: Students of GGG or GFA, other PhD students if free places are available