The KTH Guide to scientific writing in English: Sparking a conversation about how we write
Background and purpose
The recently launched KTH Guide to scientific writing in English emerged from the many discussions between teachers in Language and Communication and the wider KTH scientific writing community - students, lecturers and researchers - on the nature of effective scientific writing. As a result of these origins, the Guide is rooted in typical writing genres at KTH, and it draws on examples of these to provide guidance on the areas of sentence structure, punctuation, text flow and scientific style. Much of the focus in the Guide is on helping writers to make more informed choices, rather than simply follow strict rules. We hope to encouragethem to explore their own preferences, and thus develop their own individual academic voice. The Guide is also aligned with the KTH Language Policy and, in line with the policy’s bilingualprinciples, a guide to scientific writing in Swedish is planned.
Finished work/ongoing work
The KTH Guide to scientific writing is now in use as part of various Language and Communication courses and is available to any individual writer seeking guidance. The next stage of the project is to evaluate and develop the Guide. As a step towards this, we have encouraged our students to use the Guide and respond to four simple questions:
- What can you find in the Guide that reflects your current practice as a writer? (Reference number 25)
- What can you find in the Guide that you think might help you improve your writing?
- What can you find in the Guide that surprises you, or appears to contradict your instincts or something you heard in the past?
- What would you like to see changed in the Guide or added to the guide in order to support you in your writing?
The first question reflects the idea of the Guide as something which builds on users’ current knowledge, while the second question encourages users to further explore tools and strategies that can enhance their writing practice. With the third question, we wanted to ‘nudge’ users towards an understanding of the fact that, while some areas of language are pretty clear cut, many others are complex or contested. The final question constitutes an invitation to directly influence the content of the Guide. We are currently planning a focus group, where users can share their perceptions of the Guide and their user experiences.
Results/observations/lessons learned
The questions outlined above have served to spark an ongoing conversation about ourwriting practice at KTH, together with a discussion of the beliefs and values that underpin that practice. These conversations reflect Bond’s description of the university as “a site of linguistic struggle” (2021: 23), and we believe they are central to the cultivation of effective knowledge communication at KTH and beyond. We intend to use the responses to the questions and the content of the subsequent conversations to develop the Guide in a way that reflects the KTH writing community as a whole.
Take-home message
We hope that the Guide can be a springboard that will enable all members of the KTH writing community to be part of an ongoing and developing conversation about what it means to write well in science and engineering. In this session, we will present a summary of the responses to the four questions, and discuss the impact of these, and subsequent conversations, on the development of the Guide and writing practice at KTH.
We also look forward to input from conference attendees on how we might widen the conversation and promote discussion of scientific writing across the university.
References
Reference number 25 Bond, B. (2021) - Making language visible in the university: English for academic purposes andinternationalisation. New perspectives on language and education.
The KTH Guide to scientific writing (2022)
