Journal of Academic Writing

12 articles
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September 2025

  1. Booksprints as a Learning Format for Students in Higher Education
    Abstract

    This article introduces booksprints as an innovative teaching and learning format for academic writing for undergraduate students. Booksprints foster writing with alternative concepts of authorship and enable students to collaboratively go through an almost authentic digital writing and publishing process in a minimum of time, and at the same time facilitate various future skills, such as written communication, coping with change, and digital literacy. Still being in a ‘prototype’ phase, booksprints are only just being tested as a potential educational format that is a bridge between subject matter and writing/teaching methodology. This article, therefore, presents the basic design of booksprints as well as some specific features, such as moderation of the process by the facilitator, explicit role assignments, visualized project management and the use of digital platforms, in order to introduce them as a writing-intensive learning setting for higher education.

    doi:10.18552/joaw.v15i1.1114

April 2025

  1. Academic Writing with GenAI
    Abstract

    Academic writing has always posed a challenge to university students, regardless of the language they are writing in (first, second or foreign language) or the amount of digital support they have access to – for example, online dictionaries, thesauruses, or new generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) software such as ChatGPT. With the rise of GenAI as a legitimate digital tool in higher education, it is crucial to identify the professional development needs of teaching faculty in order to ensure quality teaching. Based on factors such as digital literacy, or access to digital tools, these needs might differ in various geographical regions. Within the context of the European Framework for the Digital Competence of Educators (DigCompEdu), this paper aims to provide a differentiated, international student perspective on the use of GenAI in the academic writing process, identifying professional development needs for faculty. We developed an online questionnaire that was filled out by 192 university students from 15 different countries. In addition to their academic and linguistic backgrounds, the respondents answered questions about their own experiences and competences with the use of GenAI within academic research. Results highlight clear discrepancies between geographic regions, for example, in their self-ranked digital proficiency or in what GenAI tools they use. This, along with further results from the analysis, provides the basis to identify some professional development needs.

    doi:10.18552/joaw.v15is2.1115

February 2025

  1. References, Paraphrases and Quotations: Essentials for Writing a Non-plagiarized Text
    Abstract

    This article examines how four students in high school or college choose to integrate sources in their assignments using quotation and paraphrases. Implementing an innovative methodology, a digital screen capture software was used to record all the participants’ actions as they wrote a 500-word argumentative essay. A video of each participant’s actions was produced. These actions translated as quantitative results and showed the frequency of various actions grouped within five categories of strategies linked to various skills (informational skills, writing skills, referencing skills, basic computer skills and task compliance skills) and a sixth category linked to plagiarism actions. The four texts were also analysed for their quality and their level of plagiarism. Results show that the college students performed better on overall text quality, but their texts contained more plagiarism. When looking at the strategies used, all students spent more time on their informational and writing strategies than on their referencing strategies. When using sources, in general, participants had more difficulties with paraphrasing than with quoting, often not referencing their paraphrases, which resulted in plagiarism. Patterns emerged for the data showing four types of actions when integrating sources in assignments: the casual integrator, the aspiring integrator, the fearless integrator and the ethical integrator. For each profile, recommendations on how to better develop students’ paraphrasing, quoting, and referencing skills are provided.

    doi:10.18552/joaw.v15is1.1071

December 2022

  1. Review of Creating Digital Literacy Spaces for Multilingual Writers
    Abstract

    This is a book review of Creating Digital Literacy Spaces for Multilingual Writers by Meghan Bowling-Johnson.

    doi:10.18552/joaw.v12i1.778
  2. Providing online social support to student writers: Virtual teaching strategies for positive engagement
    Abstract

    One of the challenges for writing tutors during the pandemic has been trying to find ways to replicate on-campus contact and support for students. In response, this teaching practice-focused paper looks at ways to provide social support to students online with the aim of increasing engagement and enjoyment in the writing process. The paper is based on a workshop session given at the EATAW Conference, in which eight different strategies for engaging remote student writers were presented, discussed, and evaluated. These strategies are: establishing networks of peer support, providing a weekly social meeting, organising writing events, encouraging blog writing, helping students with planning and providing check-in points, helping with time management, sharing recommendations for other kinds of writing, and sharing recommendations for ways to enjoy writing. All of these strategies were developed by the author at a post-1992 teaching-focused university in the south of England during the pandemic. The paper examines the needs for these strategies and how academic writing tutors may use them in practice to engage remote writers, drawing on the conference workshop discussion. The paper concludes with some recommendations for EATAW to further support writing in remote contexts.

    doi:10.18552/joaw.v12i1.796

December 2020

  1. Digital Writing, Word Processors and Operations in Texts: How Student Writers Use Digital Resources in Academic Writing Processes
    Abstract

    This study explores the use of digital technologies in the writing of an academic assignment. Fine-grained studies on student writing processes are scarce in previous research. In relation to the increasing demands on students’ writing, as well as the debate on students’ poor writing (Malmström, 2017), these issues are important to address. In this study, screen captures of five students’ essay processes are analyzed. The results show that students handle text at different levels: they make use of one or more word processors, arrange texts spatially on screens and use resources to operate directly in texts. Above all these actions seem to meet the need to move and navigate within one’s own text, an aspect that could be especially important in relation to the academic genre and for handling texts as artifacts in activity (Castelló & Iñesta, 2012; Prior, 2006). The results of the study point to the importance of making digital writing practices visible, especially those that could create possibilities to intertwine digital texts, thereby enhancing potentials for academic writing and meaning-making.

    doi:10.18552/joaw.v10i1.596
  2. Digitalization and the Writing Classroom: A Reflection on Clasroom Practices
    Abstract

    This paper outlines the educational benefits of creating digital stories for a variety of academic purposes as well as the professional need for students to develop and showcase digital proficiency. Digital stories fall under the category of multimodal composition and new media studies, and they encourage students to expand their digital literacy skills while reconceptualizing ways in which traditional writing projects can appeal to a broader audience. The article also addresses some of the classroom challenges teachers may face when trying to implement the practice and some practical resources that might assist teachers to integrate digital stories into their classrooms.

    doi:10.18552/joaw.v10i1.593
  3. Supporting Academic Writing and Publication Practice: PhD Students in Engineering and their Supervisors
    Abstract

    Supporting Academic Writing and Publication Practice: PhD Students in Engineering and their Supervisors
 This poster documents the bottom-up efforts leading to the establishment of an academic writing support program for doctoral students at an engineering university in the Czech Republic (CR).
 To defend their dissertation, by law Czech doctoral students have to have published their research. Moreover, many faculties require their doctoral students to publish in prestigious English-medium journals, which is a challenge even for the students’ supervisors. Although publication requirements prior to dissertation defence are becoming common in many countries (Kamler and Thompson, 2014; Kelly, 2017), Czech students often face a challenge of writing in the absence of any prior writing support, where insufficient knowledge of English only adds an extra hurdle to the already difficult task of argumentation absent in Czech schooling. CR has a comparatively high number of doctoral students, but also alarmingly high drop-out rates with more than 50% students not finishing their studies (Beneš et al., 2017). In part, this is due to the students’ difficulties to publish (National Training Fund, 2019). This challenge could be addressed with systematic writing development, but Czech educators and dissertation supervisors are not commonly aware of composition being teachable as we learned from our preliminary study on writing support in doctoral programs in several Czech universities (Rosolová & Kasparkova, in press). While supervisors and university leaders tended to see writing development as a responsibility of the students, the doctoral students were calling for systematic support. 
 We strive to bring attention to the complexity of writing development and introduce a discourse on academic writing that conceives of academic writing as a bundle of analytical and critical thinking skills coupled with knowledge of rhetorical structures and different academic genres. We show how these skills can be taught through a course drawing on the results from a needs analysis survey among engineering doctoral students, the target population for this course (for more information on the survey, see Kasparkova & Rosolová, 2020). In the survey, students expressed a strong interest in a blended-learning format of the course, which we base on a model of a unique academic writing course developed for researchers at the Czech Academy of Sciences, but not common in Czech universities. Our course is work in progress and combines writing development with library modules that frame the whole writing process as a publication journey ranging from library searches, to a selection of a target journal and communication with reviewers. Because we are well aware that a course alone will not trigger a discourse on writing development in Czech higher education, we also plan on involving a broader academic community through workshops for supervisors and a handbook on teaching academic writing and publishing skills for future course instructors.
 Colleagues at EATAW 2019 conference commented on the poster sharing their difficulties from the engineering context and for instance suggested a computer game to engage engineers. This resonated with our plan to invite our engineers into the course through a geo-caching game – for more, see Kasparkova & Rosolová (2020).
 References 
 Beneš, J., Kohoutek, J., & Šmídová, M. (2017). Doktorské studium v ČR [Doctoral studies in the CR].  Centre for Higher Education Studies. https://www.csvs.cz/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Doktorandi_final_2018.pdf
 Rosolová, K. E., & Kasparkova, A. (in press). How do I cook an Impact Factor article if you do not show me what the ingredients are? Educare. https://ojs.mau.se/index.php/educare
 Kamler, B., & Thomson, P. (2014). Helping Doctoral Students Write (2nd edition). Routledge.
 Kasparkova, A., & Rosolová, K. (2020). A geo-caching game ‘Meet your Editor’ as a teaser for writing courses. 2020 IEEE International Professional Communication Conference (ProComm), Kennesaw, GA, USA, 2020, pp. 87-91. https://doi.org/10.1109/ProComm48883.2020.00019
 Kelly, F. J. (2017). The idea of the PhD: The doctorate in the twenty-first-century imagination. Routledge.
 National Training Fund. (2019). Complex study of doctoral studies at Charles University and recommendations to improve the conditions and results. Report for the Charles University Management. Prague.

    doi:10.18552/joaw.v10i1.614

November 2018

  1. Exploring the Development of Writerly Identity Through the Use of Blogging
    Abstract

    This paper discusses implementation of blog writing as a formative assessment within a final year undergraduate module. Drawing on students’ perceptions and experiences, it proposes that blogging offers a more inclusive writing genre for Higher Education than traditional forms of academic scholarship.

    doi:10.18552/joaw.v8i2.453

September 2018

  1. Gaps and Overlaps in Supervisory Responsibilities: A Case Study of Bachelor’s and Master’s Students’ Thesis Writing in Two Departments
    Abstract

    This article focuses on how supervisors and students perceive their responsibilities at the beginning of the thesis writing process. Students in general do little research writing before beginning their Bachelor’s or Master’s programs and they often find academic writing to be a complicated task, which means that many do not complete their thesis writing within the stipulated time. A survey was conducted at the Department of Computer and Systems Sciences (DSV) and the Department of Child and Youth Studies (BUV) at Stockholm University, Sweden. In addition to the distribution of responsibility, participants ranked the importance of four issues: the student’s own collected data in the thesis; language, layout, and correct referencing; the thesis as an excellent product; and the student’s development of his or her competence. In general, students and supervisors agreed on the distribution of responsibilities between them and the importance of some of the issues. The opinions were coherent, considering the survey was conducted early in the thesis writing period. It is suggested that future research includes an in-depth investigation of cultural differences between departments.

    doi:10.18552/joaw.v8i1.431

September 2012

  1. Developing Academic Writing Skills in Art and Design through Blogging
    Abstract

    In the creative disciplines of Art and Design, students need to develop the ability to critically assess and put into words what they feel, think and know about their working practices (and by extension their work). The careful development of the transition between knowing instinctively, thinking and writing is well established in the literature (e.g. Schön 1983 and 1987, and Biggs 2004), but only little has been done to integrate this into the Higher Education curriculum using writing as a tool for making the reflection explicit. In order to find out whether exploratory writing in the form of blog posts has the potential to allow Art and Design students to develop their academic practice, a small scale pilot project integrated blogging tasks into introductory modules of four first year undergraduate courses. Student feedback on their experience of blogging, and particularly their perceptions of the value of blogging as exploratory writing, gained through end of module questionnaires is analysed to investigate the potential to use writing to develop their academic practice. Findings indicate that it is the motivation of students that is crucial to allow students to see writing as a thinking process and developmental tool for their practical work, rather than as an unrelated academic outcome.

    doi:10.18552/joaw.v2i1.41

September 2011

  1. Perceptions and Anticipation of Academic Literacy: ‘Finding Your Own Voice’
    Abstract

    Based on data gathered via survey questionnaire and follow up in-class discussion, the paper explores the ways undergraduate students think of themselves as writers and readers. Data drawn from a pilot survey in 2007 and a second in 2009 provides the impetus for discussion of issues of literacy and identity in a digital world. Of interest is 1) what first-year students anticipate they need to do and know, and 2) how final-year students reflect on what they have learnt in terms of academic literacies and related skills. A key issue is the way students bring a particular identity as readers and writers to university, and how this is transformed and re-inscribed through their studies. The importance of teaching for the development of rhetorical dexterity in a digital environment is highlighted because students’ digital literacy is a core element in their literacy identity. The paper also asks ‘how far should educators go in working into the space of digital literacies?’

    doi:10.18552/joaw.v1i1.19