Statistical English or English for Statisticans

Course description: The aim of the course is first and foremost to help you get your work published and with the optimal linguistic and academic quality. Another major benefit of attending is that you will learn how academic English functions. That is, what can go wrong and how can one correct and/or improve it? It is both fascinating and extremely use-ful to see how the use of language in various respects can make academic work clearer and more compelling. It is amazing what can in fact be done purely (or pri-marily) linguistically, that is, above and beyond the pure academic content. Such edited documents then become significantly better in a number of respects.

This course will therefore even help you write academic German or in other languages. Alternatively expressed, a general understanding of academic writing is as useful an output of the course as the specific errors and improvements that we will consider.

The course is thus a unique opportunity to improve your English for research, publication, conference (and teaching) purposes and with a clear statistical focus.

We can take a look at segments of your articles, or other documents and consider in detail any errors or suboptimal formulations. This includes correspondence with journals and their editors. We can also look at other relevant correspondence, such as applying for academic jobs, research funding or scholarships. Given that for these documents, authors have to rely less on the literature than in an actual article, the importance of lan-guage use is even greater.

I have very substantial resources of my own to draw on and we will integrate your material and writing as much as possible into the course. We will also consider the use of online dictionaries and hard copy dictionaries and other books on academic writing, including exercises of various kinds.

Although the course focuses primarily on written academic English, we do deal with some pronunciation errors. This is a major and underrated problem for non-native speakers presenting or teaching in English.

Topics:

Going through some work from members of the group in detail (roughly half our time is devoted to this:

  • A look at the difference between purely linguistic and academic editing
  • Use of singular and plural in academic work. For example, auditor vs auditor’s inde-pendence
  • Particularly common English errors relating to academic work
  • Poor quotations from published article and poor English general in published articles
  • Brief discussion about books on English idioms, on research writing, generally and for non-native speakers (from my scans)
  • Translation errors in business contexts
  • Language (and pronunciation) errors in conference presentations – remarkable how many there can be, and some truly amazing ambiguities this can cause

Target audience: Doctoral students of statistics or equivalent, Professors and Masters also welco

Date:
27.-28.11.2018, 09.00 am - 12.00 pm

Location: Konzil- und Professorenzimmer, Main Building of the University of Rostock, Universitätsplatz 1

Initiator: Graduiertenakademie

Lecturer: Dr. Brian Bloch, Münster

Registration: Online Registration

Format: Workshop

Participation fee: 115 €


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