Topic outline

  • 2 Your Writing


    This session takes a flipped-classroom approach. So, please get started with the learning activities and assignments! 

    In Session 2, the learning activities aim to raise your awareness of your writing behaviors. To achieve this, we begin with an activity that asks you to consider your writer type.

    More specifically, Session 2 helps you to understand writing behaviors within your writing process. Understanding this is beneficial since it can help you to overcome some behaviors that may be slowing down your writing. After that, you’ll begin to look at your writing behavior from the perspective of the types of sentences you write. The basic question is: what is your sentence style? Understanding your sentence style is essential to your success as a writer since it affects the readability of your paper. Here, note that the reason we start with sentence style is because I recognized (years ago) that students cannot write effective paragraphs in English if they do not understand their sentence style. Not only is sentence style important but also sentence type. Being familiar with the four basic sentence types in English will help you avoid writing faulty sentence structures. Throughout the course, your choice of sentence style and type will affect how readable your text is, which is why we begin with it. Upon completing this session, you will have a better understanding of both your writing behavior and your sentence style.

    Another theme that this session briefly covers is pitfalls in writing up methods sections. Although methods sections vary greatly in how they are written, these pitfalls are common. How many can you find and fix in your own methods section?

    This session contains 4 assignments, each of which has a deadline. The purpose of the deadlines is to help you keep pace with the course. Try to submit the assignments in a timely manner. Note that it is important to do these assignments before coming to the workshop (where you will discuss the assignments). If you have not completed them, you will not benefit much from the workshop. Doing the learning activities and assignments before coming to class underscores the nature of a flipped classroom.

    Here is a brief overview of the assignments. Assignment 2.1 has two parts: first, take a short quiz (2-3 min), and then report your results (by answering the questions in the 2.1 Assignment Box). Assignments 2.2 and 2.3 involve doing tasks and reporting the results in fillable pdfs attached to the respective assignment boxes. Assignment 2.4 is a Forum activity, where you'll discuss the pitfalls in methods.
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3 Introductions and Abstracts