PhD Courses in Denmark

A course to assist you with dissertation and article writing: four group sessions, three written commentaries on your texts and one 30-minute individual consultation to offer you a supportive framework with plenty of time for practice.

As a writer of a dissertation (either a monograph or a collection of articles), you need to clearly communicate your ideas, arguments and findings in confident and elegant academic prose to international audiences. During this course you will analyze Literature Review, Abstract, Introduction and Discussion/Conclusion as distinctive text types with their own rhetorical strategies in order to help yourself write and rewrite similar texts. Moreover, you will practise defining key concepts and terms, making claims, conveying various degrees of certainty and commitment, engaging your readers – strategies typical of both PhD dissertations and research articles. Additionally, you will attend to your academic communication style by experimenting with varieties of academic phrasing, refining sentence and paragraph patterns as well as self-editing.

Please note the course uses model texts and writing samples from the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Course dates and time: 
- Monday 2 September 2024, 9:45-12:30
- Monday 16 September 2024, 9:45-12:30
- Monday 30 September 2024, 9:45-12:30
- Friday 1 November 2024, 9:45-12:30

Recommended for: PhD candidates in the earlier stages of their dissertation writing; those who want to expand their rhetorical and linguistic repertoire for writing confident academic prose; those who look for assistance with composing their dissertations or research articles in stylish academic English; those who wish to benefit from a sustained period of working on their own texts in the company of their peers; those who want to become more effective academic communicators  

Course Tutor: Academic Language Consultant Elżbieta Wójcik-Leese (Ph.D. in Cognitive Linguistics; M.A. in American Literature); Fulbright scholar; former co-editor of the international peer-reviewed journal Przekładaniec: A Journal of Translation Studies and contributing editor at Poetry Wales (over thirty years of editing experience); public communicator, programme curator, workshop facilitator, academic writer, literary translator, anthologist, guest editor and poet; accredited coach in writing process and creativity. Email: ewl@hum.ku.dk

Course details: The course consists of four group sessions scheduled over 9 weeks to give you more time for writing and rewriting. The sessions are group seminars of 135 minutes (3x45 minutes) each, which concentrate on selected rhetorical strategies of academic writing. During these sessions you will perform specially designed activities and act as a peer reviewer for your colleagues. At home, you will write short assignments using your own research and drafts in order to practise the introduced tips and strategies. Three of these texts will receive the tutor’s short written feedback. To conclude the course, you will meet the tutor for one 30-minute individual consultation, when you will talk about your drafts and your writing process to help yourself with your future academic texts. 

Session 1: Join an academic conversation with your readers
 - Consider your audiences
 - Learn to read like a writer
 - Conduct a Literature Review as a peer exchange
 - Engage with your sources (author- and source-prominent citation)
 - Nuance communicating your thought processes (reporting verbs)
 - Guide your readers through your text (Academic Phrasebank)

Session 2: Communicate your domain-specific knowledge
 - Master vocabulary at your disposal (domain-specific, academic, general)
 - Adopt a suitable level of formality (Academic Word List)
 - Define key concepts (competing, contrastive, comparative definitions)
 - Understand the use of defining and non-defining sentences

Session 3: Convey your attitude to your research
 - Vary the strength of your claims
 - Signal degrees of commitment and certainty
 - Indicate research gaps and niches
 - Claim the importance of your research
 - Highlight your findings
 - Think of Abstract, Introduction and Discussion/Conclusion as promotional texts

Session 4: Write with style
 - Assist your readers in seeing what you mean
 - Negotiate the concrete and the abstract in your academic prose
 - Compose clear paragraphs (controlling ideas and topic sentences)
 - Experiment with sentence patterns and emphasis
 - Secure your texts’ unity (selected coherence and cohesion strategies)
 - Edit your texts for stylish academic writing (self-editing and proofreading tips)

30-minute individual consultation
 

Language: English

ECTS: 2.5 

Max. numbers of participants: 20

Admission and course fee:  This course is one of 3 courses organised by Centre for Internationalisation and Parallel Language Use (CIP) and offered by the PhD schools at Faculty of Humanities, Law, Social Sciences, and Theology at University of Copenhagen. If the course is oversubscribed, PhD students enrolled at one of the four PhD schools will thus be admitted to the course on a first-come, first-served basis. PhD students from other PhD schools will be put on a waiting list and may be admitted to the course a few weeks before course start if places are available. The course is free of charge for PhD students enrolled at University of Copenhagen. Other PhD students will be charged a course fee of DKK 1,200 per ECTS. 

Registration: Please register via the link in the box no later than 7 August 2024. Registration is closed.

Further information: For more information about the PhD course, please contact the PhD Administration (phd@hrsc.ku.dk).