Finding your Academic Voice: Avoiding Red Herrings

Wednesday 23rd of June

10am - 12pm

Dr Mo Egan, University of Stirling

Dr Egan is a Lecturer  in Criminal Law and Human Rights at the University of Stirling. She currently researches the legal regulation of privacy in digital space. She has a keen interest in the construction of identity and its relationship to gender, race, age, disability and power, in the context of research dissemination. She is a reviewer for the Journal of Legal Research Methodology and SGSAH Law Catalyst Member.

About this Session

Academic work is about communicating your ideas and arguments, rather than deliberately trying to sound clever! Putting together a cohesive set of conclusions, with a convincing argument to test a hypothesis is essential to successful academic writing, and core to the completion of your thesis. But it is by no means easy. Falling in to the trap of using colloquialisms, red herrings, myths, idioms, logical fallacies, and slang undermines your academic work and can make your point difficult to follow. This session is designed to give you the skills to develop your academic writing, but also to show you how to avoid falling in to common linguistic and stylistic traps when completing your writing. With practical activities, critical reflection, and hints and tips, you will gain confidence in communicating both in writing and orally.

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this session, paricipants will:

• Develop knowledge of academic conventions (structure, content and referencing) in academic writing
• Develop an understanding of factors influencing the development of academic voice
• Develop knowledge of good practice in research communication
• Develop the ability to apply good practice to their work.

Who might be interested?

Ideal for students at any point of a PhD, but especially those approaching the latter stages who are currently drafting their thesis and/or engaging with other modes of research communication.

Participant Pre-requisites

Participants will be required to prepare one short excerpt of writing (350 words max) that will be used for a peer review exercise. Referencing is at the discretion of the participant depending on they type of writing they choose (e.g. a conference abstract may have less references than a thesis section or journal article).

Participants will be 'paired' in advance of the session where possible. Early registration is encouraged to facilitate this. Guidance will be provided on how to conduct the peer review together with the assigned abstract.

Event contact: mo.egan@stir.ac.uk 

Click Here to Register (Please note that places are limited and will be allocated on a first come first served basis) 

First published: 26 May 2021