Academic Writing Support at FASoS by John Harbord

For first year students, reading and understanding academic texts can be difficult, especially when it comes to summarising main and supporting arguments. In this 20-minute lecture, John gives advice for the summarising assignment specific to BA European Studies and Arts and Culture, but the contents are relevant for other programmes as well.

In this 10-minute video, John explains for students new to academic citation or to APA style, how to correctly cite sources and create a reference list.

In 10 minutes, John gives a quick overview of the elements that make up an argument, and proposes a simple way to ensure your argument is visible and that you effectively support claims with evidence. Naturally, there are many more complex approaches to constructing an argument that are not discussed here.

If you don’t have time to watch the full workshop video on introductions, you can capture the essence of writing an introduction here in just over 10 minutes.

If you haven’t got time for the full workshop video on literature reviews, this one covers the most important points in just over 12 minutes.

This 10-minute video outlines the basics of using sources. It covers some of the same topics as the Using APA video, but also addresses larger issues of why we use the work of other writers.

Do you struggle with the workload of reading academic texts? This video offers a few tips for effective strategies to make reading a little easier and more effective, including how to use the SQ3R technique..

First drafts are exactly that: they are not polished or complete, and they will probably contain elements you don’t need or miss things you do. In this video, John talks about things to think about and strategies to use to improve your draft, both at micro and macro level.

Academics increasingly not only need to do academic writing but to write shorter and slightly more informal pieces which are for a broader audience, and which may make use of visuals and other possibilities of multimedia. Several FASoS courses ask students to write blogs. This video was prepared for students in Digital Society, but will be useful in other fields.

If you plan to present at a conference, you will need to write an abstract so people can decide whether to come to your presentation or not. But some FASoS courses also ask you to write one as a kind of short proposal of your research. A conference abstract is different from a publication abstract. The latter is discussed in the thesis workshop on conclusions and abstracts.

For most BA and MA degrees you will need to write some sort of proposal. Some courses, for example in European Studies, require you to write a research proposal for empirical research that you will not actually need to carry out. This video was originally made for European Studies, but much of it is relevant to all proposal writing.

Good paragraphs make your writing clearer and help your ideas come over clearly. In this 11-minute video John goes over some of the general principles of good paragraphing.

Receiving feedback is one of the most valuable ways of learning, partly because it is individualised to your needs. But when tutors are overworked and can’t give as much feedback as you would like, you can give and receive feedback from each other. Some students dislike peer feedback. This video explain how to give really useful peer feedback, and how to make use of it when you get it.

This video is principally aimed at staff, to help you give feedback that students will like and be able to make use of. Students who are keen on giving good peer feedback may also be interested as the video goes further than the basic one about giving feedback.

If you apply for further studies, you will very likely be asked to write a motivation letter or personal statement, or to fill in a section of the application form with an explanation of your motivation to study. Writing about ourselves is something we rarely do in university, and many people feel uncomfortable selling themselves. This video shows an effective and convincing way of writing that document.

Most of us feel nervous about timed exams, but there are various strategies you can use to improve your chances and make the whole experience less stressful. The examples in this video were prepared from Digital Society past papers, but the strategies are useful in any closed written exam.

Not just students, but all of us have to worry about how to manage the things we need to do so that the important stuff like papers or the thesis get completed on time. In this video, John offers some tips and strategies for making time work for you, not against you.

Many programmes ask students to write a text in which they discuss ideas from two texts, whether these are chosen by the coordinator or by the student. Many students do poorly at this task because they assume it is a kind of comparative summary. This video explains how to be more successful at responding to the work of other authors, a skill that will be crucial later in reviewing literature.

In this interactive workshop, you will analyse extracts from academic introductions and have the chance to draft parts of your own introduction. If you watch with a friend, you can also give each other feedback. The resulting text will provide a rough first draft for your thesis introduction that you can expand. The guidelines are equally suitable for writing an introduction to a research paper or article for publication.

The work of other scholars is used throughout the thesis, but especially in the literature review and theoretical framework. These are sometimes combined and sometimes separate. For convenience, this workshop looks at writing a literature review to identify a research gap, while its partner video looks at theoretical frameworks. By looking at samples from published articles you can learn how sources are used and combined to build arguments about research needs.

This workshop continues with the second half of the scene-setting for empirical research in the thesis, the theoretical framework. It also touches on the methodology chapter. As well as looking at the overall purpose of these section, it highlights appropriate language that can be used to make the rhetorical moves needed to justify an approach.

In this video, recorded in 2020, John offers an overview of the challenges of writing a thesis. The video was prepared for the BA European Studies, but is broadly relevant for all FASoS BA and MA courses. 

The chapters of a thesis, and indeed sections of a paper, are a series of connected steps on a path towards the goal of the research. Dividing the paper into steps makes it more organised and readable, but connecting the steps helps the reader see the overall direction of the argument. Using metaphors of stepping stones, building blocks and hitch-hiking, this workshop explains how to link chapters into a coherent whole and provides language strategies to do so.

Analysis can take on very many different forms, depending on the chosen data and method. This workshop aims to provide a broad overview of what analysis means, using two examples from different fields and methods.

Qualitative research is very often about verbal data – that is, we want to study how people do things with words, or what they think about things. Based on examples from one of the most common forms of verbal data, interviews, this workshop shows how to make an argument out of your raw material, combining claims and evidence, and situating your empirical data in relation to the literature. Bear in mind that if you use a specific method, such as critical discourse analysis, your approach may be somewhat different from what is suggested here.

This final workshop in the thesis series deals with concluding the research effectively, and with writing a publication abstract, which summarises completed research. This is different from a conference abstract, which proposes research (there is a video on this too).