Centre for Writing and Scholarly Communication

One of the major challenges that academic writers encounter is making connections within the text, for example, making comparisons and drawing conclusions. Rather than counting on readers to figure out the meaning of a difficult text, academic writing requires writers to make clear connections between ideas.

Writing at the graduate level involves participating in ongoing debates and conversations in your field, especially through literature reviews and proposals. Engaging in this conversation requires aligning with certain perspectives while distancing yourself from others, and emphasizing certain interpretations while allowing for other perspectives.

This workshop aims to help writers in STEM research to improve their writing by supplementing their intuitions about what “sounds about right” with data-based methods for interrogating the language choices in a STEM sub-discipline and across sub-disciplines.

Writing an effective Introduction is not an easy task, especially for multilingual writers who speak English as an additional language. As a complement to the workshop “Research Article Introductions: Mind the Gap,” this workshop introduces participants to common academic expressions characteristic of Introductions (e.g., background context, literature review, knowledge gap).

Writing at the graduate level involves bringing findings into conversation with explanatory and methodological frameworks, and theoretical ideas and concepts. Presenting your specific study requires waves of meaning-making, articulating how your findings can be explained or how ideas are exemplified or illustrated by your evidence.

The research article is the most privileged form of publication in which academics present their intellectual contributions. As such, conclusions offer writers several final opportunities to engage with readers in this high-stakes writing situation.

This workshop is for graduate students applying for Doctoral Tri-Council funding: CIHR, NSERC, and SSHRC. Drawing on evidence-based research about successful grant proposals, facilitators discuss particular elements of this written academic genre: audience, purpose, knowledge gap, competence claim, structure, style, and more.

This workshop is designed for undergraduate and master’s students applying for funding from the Canada Graduate Scholarship-Master’s (CGS-M) Program. Drawing on evidence-based research about successful grant proposals, facilitators discuss particular elements of this written academic genre: audience, purpose, knowledge gap, competence claim, structure, style, and more.