Designed for...
…master’s students, medical and health sciences graduate students who are about to start or have just started their dissertations, and for researchers at any stage of their career, especially those who want to write more quickly and efficiently.
Duration
3-6 hours
The course is shorter when I focus only on the theory and method, and longer when I include time for participants to create and revise their own project outlines.
Cost
My standard rate for teaching is 1530 CHF/Euro per day, or 1000 CHF/Euro per half-day. A full day of teaching includes 6 hours of teaching in the classroom, excluding breaks (e.g., coffee, lunch). For work outside Switzerland, clients also pay travel expenses.
Outlining is a skill that native English speakers learn in grade school and refine throughout their secondary and university courses. Most native English speakers are taught to draft an outline before they write a paper, but this practice is uncommon among native speakers of other languages. In English, the connection between paragraphing and outlining is clear: the topic sentence of a paragraph sums up the main idea of each paragraph. Participants learn how to organize the flow of ideas in their paper by drafting and testing potential topic sentences and arranging them in an outline. By properly arranging topic sentences, writers can match the flow of a scientific narrative to the format and length requirements of their target journal. Once topic sentences are properly ordered, they can easily be expanded into full paragraphs—a strategy that reduces time wasted by writing first drafts that include digressions and exceed length limits. Note: This course uses MS Word, but the technique will work with any outlining program or word processor that includes an outline function. Outlining can even be done by hand.