Finally… I finish something that I’ve started! 😀
To sum up, here are the summarized notes of the Technical English course that I got on my first year of PhD, focused only on the writing style.
- part 1: about formal writing style and how to utilize a concordancer
- part 2: all about articles!
- part 3: all about choosing the right form and the pronoun one
- part 4: extra information clauses, all about paraphrasing, and mistake detection
Note that the course covers much more than that, i.e. the effective writing strategy, how to do slides and presentations, and how to write things (we got assignments of writing bio-data statement, mini literature review, abstract and introduction).
One of the topics is about how to describe the goal of the paper. The main ‘techniques’ are:
The aim/goal/purpose/objective of this work/paper/investigation/study/article/research is/was to …
This paper/work/article/study/investigation/research aims to (or less commonly seeks to, attempts to) …
However, one needs to be careful in using seeks to and attempts to. “Attempts to overcome”, “seeks to extend” are still appropriate, avoiding sounding arrogant and leaving the reader to decide whether the attempts are successful or not. Meanwhile, “attempts to describe”, “tries to review” will sound very insecure, since it is not so difficult to describe and review something and it should be done confidently.
More topics on writing structure and writing tips are better covered in the following links:
- Writing Technical Articles, from the Computer Science department at Columbia University
- How to write a PhD Thesis, from the School of Physics, University of New South Wales
- Write the thesis, from Monash University (Write a research proposal is what I particularly need now :p)
- “So long, and thanks for the Ph.D.!”, the 4th guide in the Hitchhiker’s guide trilogy on how to survive graduate school
There you go… Wish you a happy writing! 🙂
Especially for 28th cycle ICT PhD students in Trento who need to submit a qualifying exam (research proposal) paper on the beginning of next month. Let’s finish that, we can do it!! 😀