Fine Tuning Academic Writing at BNRU

The course was for postgraduate students and teachers of the University, who had the opportunity to get better acquainted with the process of academic writing, focusing on its main aims and objectives. During the classes, participants studied the documents regulating the ethical side of writing scientific papers, learned of stylistic features that label their texts as scientific, and studied article structure within their genre in detail. The course was taught by experienced teachers from the Department of Foreign Languages and Professional Communication, the Department for Second Foreign Languages and the Department of Global Economics. These teachers were Professor Vladimir Moskovkin, Dr Andrei Peresypkin, Dr Igor Boichuk, Dr Elena Kalyuzhnaya, Dr Marina Klochkova, and Ian Turner, a postgraduate from the UK. Students were given the opportunity to consolidate their skills in every aspect of the process, including how to work with science-based databases, and received a number of recommendations and tips, which should significantly optimise work flow. Anna Tkacheva, Assistant to the Head of the Department of Global Economics, shared her impressions of the course, saying,

“All the teachers taught us very useful things. Each of them gave valuable recommendations on how to publish scientific articles in prestigious publications, and on how to do that in English. Mr Turner gave us an intensive lesson on the 'problem spots' in the English spoken by native Russian speakers. He gave us a unique insight into writing an article in authentic English, and introduced us to the latest trends in foreign journals, sharing his personal experience in the problems around the publication of a scientific article.”

This course of lectures and seminars was developed by the Centre for Foreign Language Education and Academic Writing by its Director, Dr Larisa Tsurikova, along with Professor Moskovkin and Dr Peresypkin. Dr Tsurikova said that,

“In this day and age, research scientists are faced with the need to not only understand scientific texts in English, but also to write them. Classes devoted to academic writing, solve just this problem, providing assistance to newly-qualified scientists in particular, who are facing difficulties in translation when covering everyday problems. The program we developed had a practical result. By the end of the course, each participant was better able to translate and edit a scientific article and prepare it for publication. The inaugural program was enjoyable for all the participants, and after making a number of adjustments, we aim to run the course biannually.”