Workshop on Academic Writing

A workshop on Academic Writing was organized on 5 th , 6 th & 10 th December 2022 for BCom final year students. The participation for the same was voluntary. The resource person Dr. Richa commenced the session with a brief introduction of the concept of writing with the support of faculty in-charge. She outlined the difference between Academic Writing and General Writing and gave some valuable insights on it. She recognised and addressed a few common problems experienced by the authors. Some of those included people believing they cannot write properly, lack of imagination, limited vocabulary, a difficulty to express one's views and not knowing from where to start the writing process. She described several other academic writing genres, including essays, research papers, research proposals, and literature reviews. Difference between formal and informal sentences was also discussed and various types of sentences or paragraphs like argument, explanation, judgment, opinion, etc and how to use it in our research paper. Repetition of words in a paragraph also makes the research paper look informal so not to go with repetition words rather choosing its synonym or some other word to make the research paper look more formal. 

Then she discussed the most frequent mistakes authors make like use of informal language, inappropriate word choice, synonyms, punctuation, long sentences and paragraphs, the use of tenses, text plagiarism, and consistency. These errors were discussed accordingly. Identifying the main topic, supporting sentences in a paragraph and continuing the flow of a paragraphwere also taught by her. She helped us with how to switch to the next paragraph with proper connection in between the paragraph holding the continuation of the last paragraph. Citing sentences from others research papers seemed difficult but then the resource person helped the participants out by citing each sentence with proper format. Her teaching was based on practicality. Throughout her lecture the students had hands-on training with our research paper rectifying the errors that they had. She also put emphasis on the vocabulary that needs to be used in the whole process of academic writing. She shared some examples in the form of sentences as well as highlighting the academically valid words that should be used instead of the generally used words. Dr. Richa further shared the vocabulary list and suggested the students to replace the wrong words with the new and valid ones.

She concluded by describing the various parts of a research paper and quickly outlining the pertinent measures to consider when writing a research paper, which are as follows: Select a topic, brainstorming session, conduct a review, organize your thoughts, write freely, edit for grammar, proofread. There was also a lot of work on the participants’ individual papers and apart from the hands-on training they were able to find the mistakes in our paper and get one on one answers to our problems. Dr. Richa's final advice was to write without self-doubt and while having joy, to avoid being afraid of the idea of writing. The session was then called to a close with a formal vote of thanks to the resource person.

Overall, the sessions on Academic Writing were very interactive and insightful for the participants.