“Attempting the impossible”?: On creating a guide to scientific writing in English
2023 (English)Conference paper, Oral presentation with published abstract (Refereed)
Abstract [en]
LSP teachers working at KTH Royal Institute of Technology have created a guide to scientific writing in English. This is an online resource that aims to raise awareness of what constitutes effective scientific writing.
The guide emerged from interactions between LSP teachers and their students and faculty colleagues on the nature of effective scientific writing in English. As a result, and in contrast to many other university writing guides, the KTH guide is rooted in the typical writing genres and conventions of a technical university, and draws on examples of these to explore sentence structure, punctuation, text flow, and scientific style.
Since its launch, the guide has become an integral part of classroom practice, and it has drawn a number of comments from students and faculty colleagues in anonymized surveys and course evaluations. Our analysis of these comments suggests that users appreciate the focus on scientific writing (as opposed to more general academic writing), but that some struggle to find answers to specific questions.
In this paper, we introduce the guide, present a thematic analysis of the evaluations, and discuss the impact of these on the development of not only the guide, but also on scientific writing practices at KTH.
Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2023.
Keywords [en]
scientific writing, online guide, English
National Category
Specific Languages
Research subject
Education and Communication in the Technological Sciences
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:kth:diva-338121OAI: oai:DiVA.org:kth-338121DiVA, id: diva2:1805056
Conference
Language for Specific Purposes in Higher Education 2023, Stockholm, Sweden, 8 September 2023
Note
QC 20231016
2023-10-162023-10-162023-10-16Bibliographically approved