ReallyWrite – Impactful Academic Writing

Broaden your reach and maximize your impact by writing clearly and concisely about your research. This course helps you learn the fundamental principles of clear writing.

What You’ll Learn In Impactful Academic Writing

Part 1: The basics of clear writing

• Introduction
• The Struggle of Academic Writing
• Resources
• Creating a shared vocabulary
• Active Voice and Passive Voice
• Active and Passive voice: a moral choice?
• Active and Passive Voice exercises
• Parallelism
• Parallelism is everywhere
• Parallelism practice
• The Writing Process
• Conscious Prewriting exercise
• Example outline format
• Editing Code
• Structuring the Methods Section
• Writing the methods section

Part 2: Writing with flow

• Part 2 overview
• The Science of Scientific Writing
• Information flow
• Information flow practice
• Flow in paragraphs
• Linking words handout
• Linking Words practice
• Dealing with numbers
• Writing the results section

Part 3: Writing with verbs

• Part 3 overview
• Verbs and formality
• Formality practice
• Punctuation
• Relative Clauses
• Swales’ Moves for Introductions
• Identify the moves
• Writing the introduction

Part 4: Writing concisely

• Part 4 overview
• Wordiness
• Wordiness examples
• Differences between similar words
• Easy to remove wordiness
• How to replace wordy expressions (reference)
• Verb tenses
• The Curse of Knowledge and Chunking
• Swales’ moves for discussions
• Writing the discussion

Part 5: Writing precisely

• Part 5 Overview
• Jargon and Acronyms
• A tale of Two Englishes
• American English vs British English
• Writing Checklist
• Putting it all together: practice with a text about sustainability
• Putting it all together: practice with a text about plants
• Sample cover letter
• Abstracts
• Sample abstracts, two formats
• Writing the abstract
• Course Evaluation Survey