Style in Research Writing

The overall aim of this course is to expand your expressive range and enhance scholarly "voice" and effectiveness.

By the end of this course you will:

• be able to make your stylistic voice sound clearly
• understand how syntax and vocabulary affect style
• understand how style affects the reader

 Topics will include (according to participants’ needs and interests):

• information flow and how to modulate it by using conventional and ‘marked’ (emphatic) sentence structures
• active vs. passive voice (reasons for using or not)
• I/we as part of a scholar’s ‘rhetorical toolkit’
• typical tense use in different parts of the research paper
• other topic(s) indicated as relevant by participants in the pre-course task that will be sent to all participants 

This course takes the participants' own research writing and that of established scholars in their fields as a starting point to explore the interface between form (grammar/syntax), style/rhetoric and argumentative structure.

Laurie Anderson, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Siena, and part-time Professor at the Max Weber Programme, and has published extensively on academic writing and publishing. She has also co-edited several volumes on academic communication.