One-Day Intensive Workshop
Sample Schedule
Morning session -- 10:00 AM to 12:30 PM
The morning session will detail what authors of academic research papers must know before they start writing a paper.
Introductory material and overview (1.0 hour)
Understanding the global writing process and the position of the author in that process is essential to efficiently writing a good paper. This unit will also touch upon what every author needs to prepare before starting to actually write.
Style and formatting (1.5 hours)
Authors must have a strong grasp of style and formatting if they want to write a paper for publication. Japanese authors typically are unaware of what style and formatting actually covers. Moreover, style and formatting issues are commonly thought of as minor or even ignored by Japanese authors, but these issues may lead to significant problems if they are ignored.
Afternoon session 1:30 PM to 5:00 PM
The afternoon session will detail how to organize a paper at the global level and how to write better at the sentence level.
Organization (1.0 hour)
Organization of content is the most important crucial element of writing a research paper. Even if a well-organized paper has numerous grammatical mistakes, the foundation of the paper may still be strong. However, only the author can organize the content in a paper in the most effective manner. This unit will provide an overview on the principles of English organization and highlight the differences between English and Japanese styles of organization.
Grammar (1.0 hour)
Grammar is often considered a boring and difficult topic. However, the goal of this unit is to provide Japanese authors with a few simple rules that can greatly improve their writing both in terms of basic grammar and clarity of meaning.
Practical applications - Analyzing real-world examples of writing by Japanese academics (1.0 hour)
Papers written by Japanese academics tend to have certain common problems that can make these papers difficult to understand and time consuming (or even impossible) to edit into a good English academic research paper. Some “real world” examples will be shown here to provide insight into these problems along with strategies for writing papers that are easier to understand, easier to edit and more likely to get accepted.
Recap and reflections (0.5 hours)
The workshop will be concluded with a brief overview of the material covered, how to incorporate this new knowledge into future activities and strategies for further improvement.
