Academic Writing in English: Ethics, Structure, and Style 3700-AL-AWE-OG

It is by now indispensable for students at European universities to write in English. After acquiring basic writing skills, however, students still need to learn to revise their papers for publication. Both steps in the process are crucial for success – the creation of a text and the clarification of its meaning through revision. Editors of international journals seek to publish articles that are ethically prepared, well-structured, and stylistically effective.
In this course, students will gain a working familiarity with international standards for the writing, revision, and editing of scholarly manuscripts for publication. The course is designed for the advanced student (at a minimum, a student of II stopnia) who has already written a paper for another purpose (a previous course, a conference, etc.), which the student would like to improve, potentially for publication.
The course will be conducted as a workshop. Students will read materials relevant to the three aspects of academic writing named in the course title in order to extract practical guidelines.

The section on ethics will examine benefits and pitfalls of cooperating with colleagues on the production of one’s own text. What constitutes useful criticism and what are the limits of a colleague’s “helpful” re-writing? How should an author engage scholarship which contradicts one’s own analyses? Beyond that, what is the proper use of Artificial Intelligence programs: Spellcheck, Grammarly for editing? GoogleTranslate? Most controversially, is there a proper use of ChatGPT for generating prose? Another ethical concern arises from the dominance of English as a lingua franca in worldwide scholarly discourse. The universalist claims of the norms and practices of this discourse, visible most saliently in academic communities in North America, Britain, and Australia, and to an extent also in Europe, have attained hegemonic status. Ethics requires that the universalist claims of “academic writing in English” be submitted to a decolonizing critique. This will be part of the course’s discussion of the ethics of writing.

As a practical matter, however, this majority of the course will concentrate on identifying, and learning to craft, the structure of a text expected by editors of English-language international journals. The principal structural element editors look for is a clearly articulated central argument, in which the author identifies the work’s contribution to scholarship, and which serves as the organizing principle for presenting evidence to support the author’s claims.

Finally, the course will address effective English style. Students will become familiar with scholarship on the productive use of the specificities of English-language syntax for constructing an academic text’s narrative flow. The construction of the text will be accomplished primarily by means of coherent paragraphs and lucid, compelling sentences.

In addition to attending class meetings, students should expect to devote twice the amount of time of a class period to reading and writing outside of class. There will be three principal writing assignments, which will consist of successive revisions of the text that had been presented on the first day of the course. The revisions should be annotated by references to readings and class
discussion. (For this 30-hour course, 60 hours is the additional time required outside of class to achieve the desired effects of learning.)

Terminy zajęć i konsultacji:
22.II - zajęcia
28.II konsultacje indywidualne (9:45-11:15 s. 4 lub 13:15-14:45 s. przy Dziekanacie)
29.II - zajęcia
14.III (jedyne spotkanie przeprowadzone zdalnie)
11.IV - zajęcia
17.IV konsultacje indywidualne (9:45-11:15 s. 4 lub 13:15-14:45 s. przy Dziekanacie)
18.IV - zajęcia
16.V - zajęcia
22.V konsultacje indywidualne (9:45-11:15 s. 4 lub 13:15-14:45 s. przy Dziekanacie)
23.V - zajęcia