Graduate School Forest and Agricultural Sciences (GFA)

Academic Writing: Effective Strategies for Publishing in English


Responsible person
Frank Lauterbach
Language
English
Workload
30 h attendance time
30 h self-study time
Credits
2
Schedule
25th and 26th September, 9th and 10th October 2025

9:30 - 17:30

Location
tba
Number of students
16
Registration
Please send an email until 31.08.2025 to hannah.schoenen@uni-goettingen.de

Are you planning to write a paper or disseration and are asking yourself how to best go about it? Or, have you started writing, but are unsure how to most effectively bring across your ideas and findings? Or, have you finished a draft and are wondering how to best polish it for publication?

If these or similar situations sound familiar to you, this workshop is for you. You will learn how to best express yourself, what criteria a well-written English paper needs to fulfill, and how you can manage the writing and publication process most productively. Thus, the focus is on developing your own personal writing skills – instead of relying on (often unreliable) AI tools.

Together, we will discuss important requirements for developing powerful English sentences, paragraphs, and texts that meet the expectations of readers, reviewers, and editors alike. For that, we are going to work closely with your own work in progress in order to practice how to effectively organize the writing process and how to successfully prepare your papers for publication. You will also get the opportunity to receive both peer and expert feedback on one of your own pieces of academic writing (see below).


Workshop Content: Concretely, you will learn how to:

  • communicate professionally in English as an academic writer;
  • organize your writing process efficiently;
  • get started with writing your text;
  • define the focus and objective of your research paper or dissertation;
  • develop adequate outlines for paper (and other) introductions;
  • adequately reference and critically review previous research in your field;
  • recognize the overall organization of research writing;
  • outline the individual sections of your paper (or other academic texts);
  • achieve coherence in your writing;
  • present and discuss your findings;
  • create powerful abstracts;
  • draft well-focused paragraphs;
  • apply the stylistic conventions of academic writing to your texts;
  • write clear and concise sentences in English;
  • connect sentences and link ideas to make your text flow well;
  • avoid some typical grammatical mistakes and pitfalls;
  • enhance your use of academic vocabulary;
  • use (and not use) AI tools (such as Chat GPT);
  • overcome potential obstacles or anxieties throughout your writing process;
  • master the submission, review, and publication process.


Requirements: To participate in the workshop, you need to register for the course through the GFA and, after having been accepted into the course, submit one (and only one!) writing sample of yours to the course instructor. This can be a draft of a paper or a part of it (such as an introduction, abstract, etc.). You do not need to have a finished version yet; drafts at any stage of the writing process are perfectly fine.
Please mail your text as a Word-file to the course instructor Frank Lauterbach (frank.lauterbach@posteo.de) at least one week before the first workshop meeting (i.e., by Thursday, 18 September, 2025). Appropriate sections for discussion will then be distributed to the other course participants. Please note that you should submit a text only after your course registration has been confirmed by the GFA! The course instructor is not in charge of the registration process.

To be eligible for credits (2 ECTS), you need to:

  1. email the instructor a piece of your academic writing before the workshop (as explained above);
  2. provide some of your peers with short written feedback on selected aspects of their writing (in small groups);
  3. submit a written reflection after the workshop in which you outline how the course in general and the discussion of your work in particular have helped you rethink and improve your writing.


Admission requirements: Students of GGG or GFA, other PhD students if free places are available


Cancellation policy:

Your registration for courses and workshops offered by the GFA is binding. If you want to cancel your registration later than three weeks prior to the workshop start date, you have to provide a physician's note. A late deregistration without a reason for illness is only possible with the consent of the first supervisor. If non of these two conditions is met, you will be barred from registering for GFA courses for the period of one year.
Please be aware that with a late deregistration you block seats for other PhD students, which otherwise could have taken part in the workshop.

Absence policy

To earn credits for a workshop/course, you must not miss more than 10% of total contact hours. In most cases, this will be less than a day. If it is inevitable that you miss more than a whole day, please notify us well in advance (at least one week).