Workshops for writers

For science & technical writers

Writing up research

Available workshops

An overwhelming majority of scientific and technical papers in print and electronic media continue to be published by authors and journals in developed countries. This “imbalance” in the ownership of scientific and technical knowledge is the subject of much debate, not just among academics and scientists, but also among policy makers who recognize the importance of science and technology in a globalized economy. Authors in developing countries often struggle to get published in widely read international journals simply because they lack guidance and support in writing up their research.

This series of one-day workshops examines the genre of the journal research article and provides practical guidance on how to structure an article for publication. The workshop uses current research articles in the participants’ fields of study to illustrate underlying structures for ordering and sequencing ideas and characteristic grammatical structures for each section of standard journal article formats. The workshop also looks at how journal editors work, the peer review process used by international journals and the ‘politics of publication’.

Workshop synopsis

Workshop One
Opening, introductions, orientation, course administration.
Discussions on writing as a product, writing as a process and individual writing processes.
Introductions and Abstracts.
Illustrations and explanations of the “four-move pattern” of journal article introductions (illustrations are taken from the current published literature of the participants’ research fields). Participants practice analyzing journal article introductions using the four-move pattern and compare these to their own introductions.
The four-move pattern in Abstracts.
Current publishing practices and how they affect authors from developing countries.
Workshop Two
Working with “the literature”.
Accessing global literature databases.
Methods and techniques for planning your literature review.
Making decisions about what to cite.
Quotations and plagiarism.
Citation indexes.
Accessing literature online.
Workshop Three
Methods and Materials (Note: this workshop can be designed for qualitative or quantitative research. The outline below is for quantitative research)
Appropriate levels of detail.
Tense shift.
Schemas for organizing methods and materials.
Ethical Issues in Research: Editors responsibilities and publishers concerns.
Workshop Four
Results and Discussion.
Dealing with results: The good, the bad and the ugly.
Linking results to the literature.
Elements and schemas for structuring results.
The visual communication of information.
Workshop Five
Presenting your research.
Preparing your paper for oral presentation.
Effective presentation of scientific papers.
Getting published.
Selecting the ‘right’ journal and working with journal editors.
The peer review process and its variations.
Working with reviewer feedback.

Duration: 5 days

Audience: Researchers aiming for publication in local or internationally referred English language journals.

Note: Workshops can be run consecutively or spaced two to three weeks apart.

Recommended group size: 5—12