Academic Writing

Spring Term 2017

Course Organiser: Catarina Fernandes, Antonio Filieri

Introduction

The aim of this course is to teach research and writing skills within computing science. The course will be offered to MRes and first year PhD students, and is mandatory for MRes and those PhDs who are funded by the department (including EPSRC studentships).

Important information: this course can replace the Graduate School course not the Centre for Academic English course. If your English assessment score requires you to do the Academic English course, you will need to do that one as well as the DoC or Graduate School course.

Content

The support lectures slides will be available soon.

The course will consist in a series of workshops and feedback sessions on students’ work.

Students will need to:

  • attend the workshops
  • submit a draft and final literature review that can be used for your 9 month report and thesis.
  • give a 15 min (recorded) presentation on their literature review
  • participate in 1 minute madness
  • participate in the Google poster competition

Feedback will be given on all student work.

Assessment

Students will be assessed on their 15 min presentations and on their literature review report. There will be other assignments students will have to submit and receive feedback in preparation for final assessed submissions.

Please bear in mind that our feedback will be solely on the writing style. Supervisors must return feedback on the technical content.

Schedule

Date Time Room Description Contribution
18th
Jan		 3 – 5pm 145 Academic writing workshop CF
25th
Jan		 11am – 3pm 144 Literature review workshop AF + CF
1st
Feb		 11am – 1pm 145 Presentation Skills workshop CF
9th
Feb		 9am – 6pm 217/8 Student presentations
(ASSESSED)		 Students, supervisors,
CF, AF
12th
Feb		 N/A N/A Draft literature review submission Students
20th
Feb		 1 – 3pm 217/8 Student presentation feedback AF + CF
22nd
Feb		 TBD TBD 1 minute madness Students,
supervisors,
CF, AF
8th
Mar		 2 – 4pm 145 1 min madness +
draft lit review feedback		 AF + CF
March TBD TBD Google poster competition Students, supervisors,
Google TBD
24th
Mar		 N/A N/A Literature review submission deadline
(ASSESSED)		 Students

A summary of the intended learning outcomes

By the end of the course students will be expected to:

General:

  • Be familiar with and apply several writing techniques
  • Recognise and apply features of Computer Science academic writing.
  • Identify different types of plagiarism
  • Generate a good bibliography

Literature review:

  • Identify several types of literature review and apply the adequate one to their own work
  • Recognise different types of literature
  • Use effective reading techniques
  • Summarise literature
  • Critically analyse the literature
  • Write a literature review in a coherent way

Presentation Skills

  • Summarise literature
  • Communicate effectively according to the audience
  • Prepare good quality slides
  • Apply techniques to dealing with questions (and nerves)

 

Marking schema

Will be added at the beginning of the course

Useful Resources

(will be updated as required)