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Course Title Ph.D. Seminar: Academic Composition
Language English
Instructor Richard Nowell
Contact Richard_nowell@hotmail.com or 117259@mail.muni.cz)
Structure Six x Seminars (22.02; 29.02; 07.03; 14.03; 21.03; 28;03)
Time Thursdays 14:00 – 16:50 (with break)
Location Film Studies Library (building C, Arna Nováka 1, 3rd Floor)
DESCRIPTION AND PURPOSE OF COURSE
This series of workshops invites Ph.D. students to rethink their approaches to academic
outputs through the early adoption of professional standards of development and execution.
Students will focus on six fundamentals of their craft: 1) process-driven writing, 2)
communication, 3) organization, 4) argumentation, and 5) editing, leading to the production
of an audience-friendly conference presentation. Their introduction to the rigors of
international academic standards, will equip students with the thinking and skills needed
maximize the impact and quality of their theses, and furnish them with transferable skills that
will facilitate their production of world-leading outputs across their careers.
TARGETED LEARNING OUTCOMES OF COURSE
By the end of this course, students are expected to demonstrate clear progression toward
submitting an essay to a high-impact peer-reviewed journal or edited collection. In particular,
they are expected to show growing competencies in:
• Process-driven approaches to academic outputs.
• The production of precise, economical, elegant prose
• The production of expertly structured scholarship
• The adoption of practical editorial techniques
• The production of argument-driven scholarship
• The production of strategically positioned scholarship
• The production of professional quality abstracts likely to attract publishers
• The production of professional quality conference presentations
• Self-critique and peer-to-peer critique of academic outputs
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TEACHING METHODS
This course comprises six weekly seminars conducted in the English language. Each seminar
will include a necessary but small amount of instructor-delivered content, which will outline
the weekly topics in a manner geared to maximizing practical application and life-long
learning. Sessions will, however, mainly consist of student-oriented learning: discussions,
self-evaluation, peer-to-peer evaluation, and practical exercises. Great effort will be made to
synthesize the weekly topics with students’ career development in the sphere of academic
publishing. Accordingly, students will work towards the production of an abstract for a
proposed journal article or book chapter, one that will come to reflect the cornerstones of the
course, with the aims of facilitating the production of the proposed output and securing
publication for it.
ASSESSMENT
1. Participation (75 percent)
Given the practical nature and student-oriented approach of this course, it is essential that
students are actively involved in all session. Accordingly, the breadth, depth, and relevance
of their contributions will be taken in to account as will be their willingness to engage in
constructive peer-to-peer evaluation.
2. Final Presentation – Abstract and Slides (25 percent)
At the end of this course, students shall submit a “final” draft of the abstract they have been
working on across the semester. And produce a PowerPoint presentation about this output.
This will be graded on the extent to which it reflects the qualities introduced across this
course: clarity, precision, elegance, organization, argumentation, positioning.
Submission Date: TBA.
SESSION 1 WRITING-AS-PROCESS 22 Feb 2024
If graduate students are to become professional academics, they must come to terms with the
realities of producing professional standards of scholarship. And, while there is no magic
formula, making this leap oftentimes involves rethinking how we produce our work. In this
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session, students will consider the need to replace the largely private-event approach typical
of undergraduate and early-postgraduate work with the semi-public process of embracing
redrafting and the solicitation of feedback. In so doing, this session lays a firm foundation
for subsequent sessions, in which students will consider this process step by step.
Preparation:
• Recommended Reading: Becker, “Chapter One: Freshman English for Graduate
Students … if We Start Off by Opening Up”, 1-25.
• Homework: Write a 200-250-word abstract of an essay or chapter you are writing or
plan to write.
Targeted Learning Outcome
• To appreciate the extent to which transforming the production of academic outputs
from private events to semi-public processes can maximize their quality and impact.
SESSION 2 COMMUNICATION 29 Feb 2024
It is insufficient for professional scholars merely to produce comprehensible work. Rather, it
might behoove them to aspire to the production of prose that boasts three qualities: clarity,
economy, and elegance. In this session, students will focus on the development of such a
style by approaching writing as a reader-oriented exercise in communication strategy, one
designed to maximizing the impact of their ideas by making them as accessible as possible.
Preparation
• Recommended Reading: Becker, “Chapter Two: Persona and Authority”, pp. 26–42.
• Abstracts: Student One to Revise Their Abstract for Peer-to-Peer Review
Targeted Learning Outcomes
• The adoption of techniques geared to the production of precise, elegant, economic
prose
• An appreciation of why such qualities maximize the standard and impact of
academic outputs.
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SESSION 3 ORGANIZATION 7 March 2024
High quality scholarship is presaged on the sound organization of ideas. Accordingly, in this
session, students will approach structuring their work at the macro and micro levels. They
will confront the challenges of how best to organize an output into sections, how best to
organize those sections into paragraphs, and best how to organize those paragraphs into
sentences. Students will also consider how best to compose introduction and conclusions.
Preparation
• Recommended Reading: Becker, “Chapter Three: One Right Way”, 43-67.
• Abstracts: Student Two to Revise Their Abstract for Peer-to-Peer Review
Targeted Learning Outcome
• The adoption of techniques geared to the production of argument-driven
introductions, conclusions, sections, and paragraphs.
• An appreciation of why such qualities maximize the standard and impact of
academic outputs.
SESSION 4 ARGUMENTATION 14 March 2024
If precise, elegant, economical well-organized prose is a pre-requisite of top-quality
scholarship, contributing to knowledge is its raison d’etre. Accordingly, in this session,
students will consider how best to showcase argumentation and to positioning their
arguments in relation to other work in the field.
Preparation
• Recommended Reading: Becker, “Chapter Eight: Terrorized by the Literature”, 135-
149.
• Abstracts: Student Three to Revise Their Abstract for Peer-to-Peer Review
Targeted Learning Outcomes
• The adoption of techniques that spotlight argumentation in academic outputs
• The adoption of techniques that position arguments in relation to their given field(s)
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• An appreciation of why such qualities maximize the standard and impact of
academic outputs.
SESSION 5 EDITING 21 March 2024
The production of scholarly work is a process involving reflection, reconsideration, and
revision. Accordingly, in this session, students consider how to edit their work, by soliciting
the evaluations of trusted colleagues, responding to their own nagging doubts, asking tough
questions of their work, and ultimately knowing when to stop.
Preparation
Recommended Reading: Becker, “Chapter Four: Editing by Ear”, 68-89.
Homework: Student Four and Five to Revise their Abstracts for Peer-to-Peer Review.
Targeted Learning Outcome
• The adoption of editing regimes geared to generating reader-friendly outputs.
• An appreciation of why such a quality maximizes the standard and impact of
academic outputs.
SESSION 6 CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS 28 March 2024
This session will seek to marshal the various techniques introduced in previous sessions to a
manageable academic output. Students will consider how process-driven work, sound
communication, expert organization, well positioned argumentation, and necessary editing
can be drawn upon in the production of a conference presentation. In so doing, they will
start to consider how these qualities need to be calibrated to individual types of output.
Preparation
• Produce a short PowerPoint presentation on your abstract topic.
Targeted Learning Outcomes
• The adoption of techniques geared to the production of audience-friendly conference
presentations.
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• An appreciation of why such qualities maximize the quality and impact of academic
outputs.