Academic writing is an exciting new field that is researched and taught at all of the world’s universities today. It is a field that has grown immensely in terms of research effort and prestige during the past twenty-five years. If you are new to an academic writing course, you will see that this course covers not only the traditional territory of written English — vocabulary, grammar, punctuation, organization, style, clarity, brevity etc. In fact, the focus of the course is on broader content related matters such as when to include what information where, and how. LOTT is an online course on writing M.A. theses at the Leiden English department. It is organized into five tutorials: Introductions, Conclusions and Titles/Outline, Research and Language/Style. These tutorials are to be found on Blackboard (blackboard.leidenuniv.nl) under LOTT. In addition, the course offers a great number of remedial vocabulary, grammar, style and punctuation exercises. There are links to other online writing courses, to software tutorials (MS Word and SPSS), to dictionaries and thesauruses and to libraries and other services.
Timetable
The timetable will be available from June 1st on the Internet.
Method of Instruction
LOTT is an online self-study course. The course does offer weekly 45-minute classroom Q&A sessions (see your schedule). Questions may not include questions about the answers to exercises (see below) until these answers have been posted. Please submit questions to your instructor at least 24 hours in advance – the email address is to be found on LOTT under Staff Information. Attendance of Q&A sessions is not mandatory. You need not have submitted a question to attend a Q&A session.
A la carte and contract teaching
Not available as modular course or a la carte.
Course objectives
Academic writing is learnable, and conscious application of the tools offered by LOTT will result in a clear, credible, elegant, exciting and appealing theses.
Required reading
Available in blackboard.
Examination
Course grades depend on performance on text analysis exercises (click on Week by week) and on peer review of the work of others.
Information
English Department, P.N. van Eyckhof 4, room 102c, tel: 071 5272144. English@hum.leidenuniv.nl
Blackboard/webpage
This course is supported by blackboard.