Academic writing skills for postgraduate students

To many English-as-an-Additional Language (EAL) language users, academic writing simply means the accurate use of citation and referencing style, and the construction of long and complex sentences. To broaden the understanding of the notion of ‘academic writing’ of a group of postgraduate students at my university, I organized a three-day academic writing skills workshop in August 2018. In the workshop, various important topics related to academic writing were explored. In the first workshop session, three article types commonly found in social sciences literature were discussed: empirical study, literature review, and theoretical paper. In the second workshop session, I put forward the concept of ‘academic writing style’ by showing a number of word-level and sentence-level language features commonly found in journal articles. In the last session, to encourage my students to publish their term papers and theses in refereed journals, I introduced the publication process to them and drew their attention to a number of ethical issues pertaining to publication and research. Despite focusing on academic writing skills for a group of postgraduate students in the field of educational research, the content covered in this workshop is useful to both undergraduate and postgraduate students in other social sciences fields. Copyright © 2019 Global Stories Press.