Jump-Start Your Writing: Tips and Methods for Planning and Writing Academic Texts

Jump-Start Your Writing' offers an interdisciplinary insight into the craft of academic writing. The booklet supports students with and without writing experience in writing all types of academic texts during their studies, such as term papers, protocols, document theses, and final theses. The booklet contains a compilation of collected methods, tips and checklists from six years of work at the Writing Center of Dresden University of Technology.:Basics 7 Work Phases in Scientific Writing Projects 8 1 Orientation and Planning 11 Checklist Meeting with Supervisors 12 Clustering 14 Table for the Delimination of your Topic 16 Three-Step-Exercise 19 2 Collecting and Arranging Materials 21 Reading Strategies 22 Critical Reading 23 Four Column Reading – A Technique to Excerpt Literature 25 3 Developping Text Structures 27 Structuring your Work with IMRaD 28 Flash Exposé 31 The Sticky Note Method to Plan your Writing Project 33 4 Producing Text (“Rough Draft“) 35 Thread of Thought and Text Path 36 Scientific Language 38 Freewriting 41 Argumentation in Scientific Texts 43 5 Revising Text and Getting Feedback 45 Text Revision 46 Checklist Revising the Structure of your Academic Work 48 Constructive Feedback 49 6 Final Corrections 53 Formal Correctness, Orthography and Grammar 54 7 Time and Self-Management 57 Writing Types: Structure Followers and Structure Creators 58 Writing Habits 61 Setting Goals with the SMART Method 64 Planning your Writing Time with the Tomato Technique 65 Bibliography 6