Academic Writing in English: Effective Strategies for Publishing Your Research (GGG/GFA) in person

Frank Lauterbach is head of Foreign Languages for Academic Purposes as well as coordinator of ENGLISH+, an Academic English program for doctoral and post-doctoral researchers at the Language Center of the University of Osnabrück, Germany. He studied English language and culture at the University of Göttingen and the University of California and worked as a researcher in various projects on transatlantic cultural relations. He also served as the founding manager of the English-language division at the Graduate Academy of the University of Oldenburg as well as the Scientific English program and the International Writing Center at the University of Göttingen. He has many years of experience in teaching English for Research Purposes – with a focus on academic writing and publishing, academic presenting, conference posters, international networking, and academic communication. GGG is successfully cooperating with him for more than ten years now.

Are you planning to write a paper or disseration and are asking yourself how to best go about it? Or, have you started writing, but are unsure how to most effectively bring across your ideas and findings? Or, have you finished a draft and are wondering how to best polish it for publication?
If these or similar situations sound familiar to you, this workshop is for you. You will learn how to best express yourself, what criteria a well-written English paper needs to fulfill, and how you can manage the writing and publication process most productively. Thus, the focus is on developing your own personal writing skills – instead of relying on (often unreliable) AI tools.
Together, we will discuss important requirements for developing powerful English sentences, paragraphs, and texts that meet the expectations of readers, reviewers, and editors alike. For that, we are going to work closely with your own work in progress in order to practice how to effectively organize the writing process and how to successfully prepare your papers for publication. You will also get the opportunity to receive both peer and expert feedback on one of your own pieces of academic writing (see below).

Concretely, you will learn how to:

• communicate professionally in English as an academic writer;
• organize your writing process efficiently;
• get started with writing your text;
• define the focus and objective of your research paper or dissertation;
• develop adequate outlines for paper (and other) introductions;
• adequately reference and critically review previous research in your field;
• recognize the overall organization of research writing;
• outline the individual sections of your paper (or other academic texts);
• achieve coherence in your writing;
• present and discuss your findings;
• create powerful abstracts;
• draft well-focused paragraphs;
• apply the stylistic conventions of academic writing to your texts;
• write clear and concise sentences in English;
• connect sentences and link ideas to make your text flow well;
• avoid some typical grammatical mistakes and pitfalls;
• enhance your use of academic vocabulary;
• use (and not use) AI tools (such as Chat GPT);
• overcome potential obstacles or anxieties throughout your writing process;
• master the submission, review, and publication process.

To participate in the workshop, you need to register for the course through the GGG and, after having been accepted into the course, submit one (and only one!) writing sample of yours to the course instructor. This can be a draft of a paper or a part of it (such as an introduction, abstract, etc.). You do not need to have a finished version yet; drafts at any stage of the writing process are perfectly fine.
Please mail your text as a Word-file to Frank Lauterbach (frank.lauterbach@posteo.de) at least one week before the first workshop meeting (i.e., by Thursday, 23 January, 2025). Appropriate sections for discussion will then be distributed to the other course participants. Please note that you should submit a text only after your course registration has been confirmed by the GGG! The course instructor is not in charge of the registration process.