scholarly journals Randomness and chance as writing methodology: Is there a case for Dada in the academic essay?

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-106 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Eden
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Writing Process ◽  
Writing Development ◽  
Potential Use

This article attempts to first speculate and then demonstrate how Dada methods can be used by creative practitioners or writers in general within an academic essay. In particular, the inclusion of randomness and chance is examined in the writing process with a view to foreground materiality in writing development and execution. Methods to make use of chance and to randomize text are outlined and the distinction between randomness and chance is clearly drawn. Antecedents to Dada and to the cut-up techniques that form the focus of the method outlined here are examined and offer context for the development of an embodied and empowered approach to challenges encountered around academic writing. Furthermore, contemporary scholarship that reflects on writing in higher education is drawn on to highlight the article’s primary purpose; that being to offer a background, explanation and useful methodology for the inclusion of randomness and chance which addresses the institutional demands encountered by students. The article draws on work created and discussed at a workshop that took place at Central St Martins in 2019, called ‘Breaking Into and Out of Academic Writing’. This workshop included various students from University of Arts London experimenting with the cut-up techniques and discussing their potential use in writing.

scholarly journals How to create and develop writing centres

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ingrid Galtung ◽  
Cathinka Dahl Hambro ◽  
Solveig Kavli
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Writing Process ◽  
Academic Staff ◽  
Writing Development ◽  
Learning Activities ◽  
Daily Work ◽  
Strategic Plans ◽  
Good Writing ◽  
The Way

This roundtable addresses how three Norwegian writing centres – in different stages of their establishment and settled within different constitutional frames – handle staff policy and aims to facilitate academic writing to their main users; students and PhD candidates. We will structure the discussion around four main themes that we juggle in our daily work:  Using strategic plans to promote academic writing development and student throughput Co-creating learning activities with and for MA students Keeping up with the Library and Faculty Strengthening and further developing academic writing in Higher Education Attendees at the roundtable will be invited to discuss and participate in a dialogue on the way in which writing centres can improve the students’ and PhD candidates’ writing process; why we find teaching and preaching academic writing to be an important skill, and how we can co-create learning activities in libraries and writing centres with academic staff and students. We will also discuss the issue of legitimacy, and  what it takes to move writing centre activities from the periphery to the centre of the institution and its pedagogical mission. The audience will leave with ideas and inspirations on how to facilitate and build good writing centres in collaboration between staff, librarians and experienced students.

Linguistic Markers of Stance and Genre in Upper-Level Student Writing

2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 267-295 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Aull
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Writing Development ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Student Writing ◽  
Linguistic Markers ◽  
Writing Research ◽  
Upper Level ◽  
Different Levels ◽  
Level Student

Stance is a growing focus of academic writing research and an important aspect of writing development in higher education. Research on student writing to date has explored stance across different levels, language backgrounds, and disciplines, but has rarely focused on stance features across genres. This article explores stance marker use between two important genre families in higher education—persuasive argumentative writing and analytic explanatory writing—based on corpus linguistic analysis of late undergraduate and early graduate-level writing in the Michigan Corpus of Upper-Level Student Papers (MICUSP). The specific stance markers in the study, both epistemic and textual cues, have been shown to distinguish student writing across levels; this study, then, extends the analysis to consider the comparative use of these markers across genres. The findings show two stance expectations persistent across genres as well as significant distinctions between argumentative and explanatory writing vis-à-vis stance markers that intensify and contrast. The findings thus point to important considerations for instruction, assignment design, and future research.

scholarly journals Supporting Academic Writing and Publication Practice: PhD Students in Engineering and their Supervisors

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 221
Author(s):  
Alena Kasparkova ◽  
Kamila Etchegoyen Rosolová
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Doctoral Students ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Thinking Skills ◽  
Writing Development ◽  
Academic Community ◽  
Drop Out ◽  
University Management ◽  
Doctoral Studies ◽  
National Training

Supporting Academic Writing and Publication Practice: PhD Students in Engineering and their Supervisors This poster documents the bottom-up efforts leading to the establishment of an academic writing support program for doctoral students at an engineering university in the Czech Republic (CR). To defend their dissertation, by law Czech doctoral students have to have published their research. Moreover, many faculties require their doctoral students to publish in prestigious English-medium journals, which is a challenge even for the students’ supervisors. Although publication requirements prior to dissertation defence are becoming common in many countries (Kamler and Thompson, 2014; Kelly, 2017), Czech students often face a challenge of writing in the absence of any prior writing support, where insufficient knowledge of English only adds an extra hurdle to the already difficult task of argumentation absent in Czech schooling. CR has a comparatively high number of doctoral students, but also alarmingly high drop-out rates with more than 50% students not finishing their studies (Beneš et al., 2017). In part, this is due to the students’ difficulties to publish (National Training Fund, 2019). This challenge could be addressed with systematic writing development, but Czech educators and dissertation supervisors are not commonly aware of composition being teachable as we learned from our preliminary study on writing support in doctoral programs in several Czech universities (Rosolová & Kasparkova, in press). While supervisors and university leaders tended to see writing development as a responsibility of the students, the doctoral students were calling for systematic support.  We strive to bring attention to the complexity of writing development and introduce a discourse on academic writing that conceives of academic writing as a bundle of analytical and critical thinking skills coupled with knowledge of rhetorical structures and different academic genres. We show how these skills can be taught through a course drawing on the results from a needs analysis survey among engineering doctoral students, the target population for this course (for more information on the survey, see Kasparkova & Rosolová, 2020). In the survey, students expressed a strong interest in a blended-learning format of the course, which we base on a model of a unique academic writing course developed for researchers at the Czech Academy of Sciences, but not common in Czech universities. Our course is work in progress and combines writing development with library modules that frame the whole writing process as a publication journey ranging from library searches, to a selection of a target journal and communication with reviewers. Because we are well aware that a course alone will not trigger a discourse on writing development in Czech higher education, we also plan on involving a broader academic community through workshops for supervisors and a handbook on teaching academic writing and publishing skills for future course instructors. Colleagues at EATAW 2019 conference commented on the poster sharing their difficulties from the engineering context and for instance suggested a computer game to engage engineers. This resonated with our plan to invite our engineers into the course through a geo-caching game – for more, see Kasparkova & Rosolová (2020). References Beneš, J., Kohoutek, J., & Šmídová, M. (2017). Doktorské studium v ČR [Doctoral studies in the CR].  Centre for Higher Education Studies. https://www.csvs.cz/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Doktorandi_final_2018.pdf Rosolová, K. E., & Kasparkova, A. (in press). How do I cook an Impact Factor article if you do not show me what the ingredients are? Educare. https://ojs.mau.se/index.php/educare Kamler, B., & Thomson, P. (2014). Helping Doctoral Students Write (2nd edition). Routledge. Kasparkova, A., & Rosolová, K. (2020). A geo-caching game ‘Meet your Editor’ as a teaser for writing courses. 2020 IEEE International Professional Communication Conference (ProComm), Kennesaw, GA, USA, 2020, pp. 87-91. https://doi.org/10.1109/ProComm48883.2020.00019 Kelly, F. J. (2017). The idea of the PhD: The doctorate in the twenty-first-century imagination. Routledge. National Training Fund. (2019). Complex study of doctoral studies at Charles University and recommendations to improve the conditions and results. Report for the Charles University Management. Prague.

scholarly journals How to create and develop writing centres

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ingrid Galtung ◽  
Solveig Kavli ◽  
Dina Møll Schoder ◽  
Marianne Tønnesen
Keyword(s):  
Academic Writing ◽  
Writing Process ◽  
Academic Staff ◽  
Writing Development ◽  
Target Group ◽  
Learning Activities ◽  
Daily Work ◽  
Strategic Plans ◽  
Good Writing ◽  
The Way

This roundtable addresses how two Norwegian writing centres –in different stages of establishment and settled within different constitutional frames –handle staff policy and aim to facilitate academic writing to their target group and main users, namely the students.We will structure the discussion around four main themes that we juggle in our daily work: 1.Using strategic plans to promote academic writing development and student throughput 2.Co-creating learning activities with and for MA students 3.Keeping up with the Library and Faculty 4.Strengthening and further developing academic writing in HE Attendees at the roundtable will be invited to discuss and participate in a dialogue on the way in which writing centres can improve the students’ writing process; why we find teaching and preaching academic writing to be an important skill, and how we can co-create learning activities in libraries and writing centres with academic staff and students. We will also touch on the issue of legitimacy, and how writing centre activities can be moved from the periphery to the centre of the institution and its pedagogical mission. The audience will leave with ideas and inspirations on how to facilitate and build good writing centres in collaboration between staff, librarians and experienced students.

Institutional Plagiarism Policy (Georgian higher education institutions’ case)

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Natela DOGHONADZE ◽  
Ekaterine PIPIA ◽  
Nikoloz PARJANADZE
Keyword(s):  
Higher Education ◽  
Social Media ◽  
Literature Review ◽  
Foreign Language ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Higher Education Institutions ◽  
Survey Questionnaire ◽  
Existing Problems ◽  
Copyright Violation ◽  
University Policies

The article deals with various aspects of plagiarism: definition (discriminating it from cheating and copyright violation), types (intended / unintended), involved people, causes, prevention, detection and punishment of plagiarism. A survey (questionnaire containing 42 items to be assessed in a 5-point Likert scale and one open- ended item) was conducted in Georgia. The questionnaire developed based on the literature review was uploaded on social media in three variants (to analyze the results separately and compare them): for students, for researchers and for assessors. The obtained results revealed that the opinions of the three groups of respondents differed to a certain degree, but were quite similar, eventually. The survey disclosed the existing problems, such as: lack of academic writing (in the native and especially foreign language) and research skills, lack of training in avoiding plagiarism, insufficiently clear university policies in the area, the emphasis on punishment instead of prevention, etc. Based on the obtained results recommendations for universities are given concerning plagiarism policies. 

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