Abstract:

Many students in university bachelor and master programs experience difficulties in writing, especially when it comes to their bachelor and master thesis. The cause of these difficulties is that they have not received an adequate training in academic writing skills in the earlier years of their study programs.

The aim of this presentation is to give an overview of a digitalized course in academic writing skills that has been developed at Erasmus University Rotterdam (the Netherlands) for undergraduate students in social and behavioural sciences, and undergraduate students in economics and business administration.

The course is based on the so-called microtraining method, that was originally developed for the training of communication skills for counsellors and psychotherapists. The characteristic of this microtraining method is the unraveling of separate specific communication skills in a counseling or therapeutic interview. After exercising the separate microskills the trainees have to use all the different skills in an integrated manner. In this field the microtraining method has proven to be very effective.

In our digital course in academic writing skills we accordingly have unraveled the microskills of writing a good paper or thesis. The following topics and microskills are dealt with: structuring the text; preparing for writing; writing of the content; correctly citing, paraphrasing and quoting; argumentation; bringing cohesion in the text; sentence structure; specific characteristics of scientific writing; and revision and completion. At the end of the course students should also be able to use the different writing skills in an integrated way.

On the websites www.academicwritingskillscourse.com respectively www.academicwritingskills-eba.com these skills are first discussed. Secondly, students have to do different kinds of exercises to practice the skills on their own. Thirdly they can compare their achievements with expert feedback from the digital program.

Several years of experience with this course in different university programs (psychology, education, economics) has shown that students appreciate the content of the course and that they are better prepared for writing their theses in the bachelor and master phase of their program.

Keywords:

Academic writing skills, microtraining method, effectiveness.