79600
Special Problems: Writing for Behavioral Sciences - 3 Credits

COURSE OFFERING
Fall 2003
Ph.D. Program in Speech and Hearing Sciences
Graduate Center  of The City University of New York

79600  Special Problems:  Writing for Behavioral Sciences
Wed 2:00-4:00pm

Instructor: Loraine K. Obler
lobler@gc.cuny.edu
(212)817-8809

The goals of this course are to engage students in thinking about, and writing, good written academic English. Students will learn how to structure scholarly documents and ho to edit them, and gain an understanding of hat their particular individual challenges are. A subset of students pick up good scholarly-writing habits by immersing themselves in graduate-studies readings; for most, however, it is useful to make the principles more explicit as this class will do.

Classes will consist of minimum amounts of lecture on the concepts of interest, and maximal practice by the group. In class we will practice work on the set of concepts to be focused on in each class using materials created by the professor (e.g., for research logic, transitions, editing, avoiding plagiarism). Homework will provide more opportunity for practicing the current week's topics and an opportunity to think, in advance, about the topics to be covered in the following week. In addition, participants will be asked to keep a daily journal in non-scholarly language reflecting on their writing.

As a class we will generate a list of likely individual challenges (e.g., precise word-choice, punctuation, research logic, appropriate deixis, noun-verb agreement at a distance, dialectal and/or L1 interference, spelling despite use of spell-check, wordiness) so that individuals will end the class knowing what particular issues they must pay particular attention to in editing and proofing their own work.

Class 1. Introduction to the structure and requirements of the class. Introduction to crucial notions: genre, register, audience, "rules", using models, giving credit for ideas and words, editing one's own work and that of others, drafts, research logic, motivation, transitions, clear deixis, precision. Students will talk about what their personal goals are for the class.

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