Skills for Scholarly Writing

Offerings:
Course GEDU 725 | Every spring semester.

Catalog Description:

General Education course descriptions in the USF General Catalog online.

Course Outcomes:

Students will:

  1. Engage in writing tasks that contribute to successful academic writing.
  2. Become familiar with the APA style as it applies to dissertation writing.
  3. Assess their writing in terms of how well it positions them as doctoral candidates in the USF academic community.
  4. Practice different styles of formal writing according to the specifications of the various chapters of the dissertation.
  5. Have the opportunity to select a portion of their dissertation for a final assignment.

Course Topics:

The following represents topics to be investigated during this course:

  1. Overarching considerations
    • Conceptualization of a research topic
    • Theoretical framework which forms the base of a study
    • Connections among, and between, chapters
  2. Specific to the dissertation
    • Avoidance of passive voice
    • Use of verb tense
    • Developing habits of "polishing" your writing
    • Writing alternative phraseology
    • Repetition in the dissertation
    • Stylistic differences between dissertation chapters
    • Transitions between sections/chapters
  3. APA
    • Organizing a manuscript with headings
    • Quotations
    • Numbers
    • Tables
    • Figures
    • Footnotes
    • Reference citations in text
    • Reference list
  4. Grammatical usage/writing style
    • Recognizing sentence fragments
    • Detecting comma faults
    • Agreement between subject and verb; between pronoun and antecedents
    • Correcting errors in case
    • Parallelism - Consistency
    • Writing/developing paragraphs
    • Using transitional expressions for paragraph coherence
    • Making paragraphs coherent
    • Determining the fundamental purpose
    • Planning your writing [constructing outlines]
    • Correcting misused words and phrases

Course Textbooks:

Merriam Webster's Manual for Writers & Editors. (1998). Springfield, Massachusetts: Merriam-Webster, Incorporated.

Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. (2001, 5th Edition). Washington, DC: American Psychological Association.

Strunk, Jr., W. and White, E.B. (2000). The elements of style. (4th Edition). Needham Heights, Massachusetts: Allyn & Bacon.