Event announcement: ECHER Academic Writing Clinic

workshop

August 27, 2019, University of Kassel, Germany

Many of us struggle with academic writing. Native English speakers or not, most of us spend a considerable time trying to put our thoughts together in a coherent and meaningful way, endlessly rewriting and rearranging our sentences and paragraphs, adjusting the argument for the journal of choice, choosing among references, and not least polishing the style and vocabulary and fixing the grammar.

And still, despite all that effort, our writing does not flow as smoothly as the one we sometimes see in good journals. Will it get better with experience? Probably. But this will also depend on the nature of that experience. It is not without a reason that so many writers in the past have asserted that easy reading is hard writing. Writing is, after all, a craft.

If this challenge is something you can relate to, you should definitely consider joining ECHER’s Academic Writing Clinic. The clinic will be implemented as a half-day peer-to-peer workshop on Tuesday, August 27th (afternoon) – the day before the official start of the 2019 CHER Conference.

The workshop aims at supporting early-career higher education researchers in becoming proficient academic writers. It will provide a space for learning and discussing some of the key elements of good academic writing, including common pitfalls and how to avoid them, ways to identify and engage with specific academic and non-academic audiences, and methods for critically assessing one’s own writing. During the workshop, participants will have the opportunity to discuss their own and other participants’ manuscripts or other work in progress and together work out the ways in which to improve them.

The workshop is free of charge. The call for participants, specifying the details of the workshop, will be opened in February 2019 and announced on the ECHER and CHER websites.

If you have any questions, you can contact the organisers of the workshop by writing to office@echer.org.


Melina Aarnikoivu (MA) is a doctoral student at the Centre for Applied Language Studies at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. Her dissertation is a nexus analysis of becoming a scholar. Her work can be found at ResearchGate.

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