VV043 Academic Writing in English

Faculty of Informatics
Spring 2009
Extent and Intensity
0/2. 2 credit(s). Type of Completion: z (credit).
Teacher(s)
James Edward Thomas, M.A. (lecturer)
Guaranteed by
prof. Ing. Václav Přenosil, CSc.
Faculty of Informatics
Contact Person: prof. PhDr. Karel Pala, CSc.
Timetable
Fri 27. 3. 10:00–12:50 B410, Fri 3. 4. 10:00–12:50 B410, Fri 10. 4. 10:00–12:50 B410, Fri 17. 4. 10:00–12:50 B410, Fri 24. 4. 10:00–12:50 B410, Fri 15. 5. 10:00–12:50 B410, Fri 22. 5. 10:00–12:50 B410, Fri 29. 5. 10:00–12:50 B410
Prerequisites (in Czech)
SOUHLAS
Course Enrolment Limitations
The course is only offered to the students of the study fields the course is directly associated with.
fields of study / plans the course is directly associated with
Course objectives
In this course, post-graduate students at the Informatics Faculty will be studying some formal aspects of writing academic articles in English. This course is designed to cover vocabulary, grammar and syntax as well as design and structure of longer articles. The course is a pre-requisite for the compulsory course Academic Writing Project (VVO58). It is intended that students will be able to use the data they have uploaded into the Informatics Corpus for the observation of language phenomena peculiar to this field.
Syllabus
  • The course deals with the following language topics. 1. What is end weight? 2. In what situations is the subjunctive used in English? 3. Why are topic sentences important? 4. What is a paragraph hook? 5. What is meant by hedging? 6. What are the pros and cons of using "I" and "we" in academic writing? 7. What do we need to know about nominalisation? 8. What is the "introductory there/it"? 9. What purposes does fronting serve? 10. How do we avoid sexist language? 11. What roles do to-infinitive and -ing clauses play? 12. How do we show the relationship between statements in a sentence?
Literature
  • HAMP-LYONS, Liz and Ben HEASLEY. Study writing : a course in writing skills for academic purposes. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006, 213 s. ISBN 9780521534963. info
  • ZOBEL, Justin. Writing for computer science :the art of effective communication. Singapore: Springer, 1997, xiii, 176. ISBN 981-3083-22-0. info
Assessment methods
Corpus study test, terminology test, a piece of writing demonstrating the language concepts taught.
Language of instruction
English
Further Comments
The course is taught annually.
The course is also listed under the following terms Autumn 2006, Spring 2008, Spring 2010, Spring 2011, Spring 2012, Spring 2013, Spring 2014, Spring 2015, Spring 2016, Spring 2017, Spring 2018, Spring 2019, Spring 2020, Spring 2021, Spring 2022, Spring 2023, Spring 2024, Spring 2025.
  • Enrolment Statistics (Spring 2009, recent)
  • Permalink: https://is.muni.cz/course/fi/spring2009/VV043