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.

The recently launched KTH Guide to scientific writing in English emerged from the many discussions between teachers in Language and Communication and the wider KTH scientific writing community - students, lecturers and researchers - on the nature of effective scientific writing. As a result of these origins, the Guide is rooted in typical writing genres at KTH, and it draws on examples of these to provide guidance on the areas of sentence structure, punctuation, text flow and scientific style. Much of the focus in the Guide is on helping writers to make more informed choices, rather than simply follow rules. We hope to encourage them to explore their own preferences, and thus develop their own individual academic voice.

The KTH Guide to scientific writing was created with the aim of supporting students and faculty with scientific writing in English. The guide is rooted in the typical writing genres 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 in the department of Language and Communication, and an online resource for all students and faculty at KTH. This paper presents our findings from the first stage of our evaluation of the guide. The evaluation consists of a short reflective questionnaire for users. We have begun to collect responses to the questions, and to conduct an inductive thematic analysis (ITA) to identify emerging themes. 

This study deals with variation between possessive/genitive and objective/plain forms of the subject of the verbal gerund clause (VGC) in Present-day and Late Modern British English, as in Would you object to my [me] paying her a visit? and Poor timing of spoonfuls can lead to the child’s [the child] feeling frustrated. According to the traditional prescriptivist view, the possessive/genitive form is the preferred variant. The aim of the present study is to explore to what extent possessive/genitive and objective/plain forms are used as subjects of VGCs, and to see what factors influence the variation.The study consists of synchronic and diachronic analyses. The synchronic data, drawn from the British National Corpus (BNC), represents four genres: Academic Prose, Fiction, News and Conversation. The diachronic data comprises collections of novels from the periods 1751–1800, 1851–1900 and 1960–1993 (the BNC Fiction genre). In addition to univariate analyses, multivariate analyses are performed in order to discover what factors carry more importance than others.When the VGC subject is a personal pronoun, e.g. my or me, genre plays a crucial role, with the proportion of possessives being conspicuously high in Academic Prose and significantly lower in the other genres. Regarding NPs other than personal pronouns, genre is not as important a factor; instead, the function of the VGC in the superordinate clause and linguistic factors such as animacy and the singular/plural distinction are also salient in determining variation.Moreover, results reveal that in the periods 1751–1800 and 1851–1900, the possessive form of a personal pronoun is the unchallenged norm, whereas the use of the possessive decreases considerably between the second and third periods. Genitive and plain-case forms of other NPs are evenly distributed in the first period; after that, the genitive is only used in certain contexts.