In this course, students will develop the scientific and technical reading and writing skills they need to understand and construct research articles in their specialized field. Students will first learn about the characteristic features of quality research studies, and how science and engineering research articles are constructed in terms of intended audience, purpose, organization, flow, style, and presentation. Students will next learn how to avoid plagiarism in their writing through paraphrasing and the correct citation and referencing of other people’s work. They will then begin writing a research paper following a typical “Instructions for Authors” guide that is found in most journals. For each section of the research paper, the teacher will explain its unique features, and the common problems found in student writing. In particular, there will be a focus on noun phrases usage in titles, definition and tense usage in introductions, process explanations in the methods section, figure and table explanations in the results section, hedging in the results and discussion/conclusion section, and formatting in the reference section.
Download a generic course syllabus here.
Specific details related to each teacher are available on the Waseda Moodle course page.
