Academic Writing Center (ACWR) Courses

The ability to write in a concise, organized, and compelling style is an invaluable asset in the academic community. These courses give participants the opportunity to develop their writing abilities through focusing on academic writing conventions and providing feedback from peers and instructors on written work. Participants on these courses will have the space to explore academic writing across the disciplines, investigate ways to structure their writing around effective organization strategies, and enhance their understanding of what journals expect from submitted articles.

Course Outcomes:

Learning and revising the rules of academic writing
Formulating a feasible and effective research question
Implementing ways to structure writing around effective hypotheses and creating impactful abstracts
Effective literature review skills for article writing
Writing process strategies
Strategies to facilitate article editing
Effective use of feedback
Conference presentation tips and practice

Kamuran Osmanoğlu Lecturer College of Social Sciences and Humanities

About Kamuran Osmanoğlu

Kamuran Osmanoğlu is a Lecturer at the Academic Writing Program at Koç. He received his PhD in Philosophy at the University of Kansas. Before joining Koç, he taught philosophy at the University of Kansas and Bilkent University. He has multiple years of experience in teaching writing to professionals and researchers from different disciplines. He continues his research in philosophy of (social) science, philosophy of mind, and ethics of technology.

Detailed Course Information

Taught through the Academic Writing Center, the courses allow participants to learn and revise academic writing conventions and rules, identify and study them in relevant samples from the literature, apply them to their own writing, and receive feedback from the Writing Center tutors.

Topics covered will include formulating effective research questions, reviewing the existing literature, creating impactful abstracts that introduce research concisely, understanding the organizing principles of presenting research, and enhancing scaffolding techniques in order to accelerate productivity. We will also practice effective revision strategies in order to help participants identify mistakes or ineffective presentation issues in early drafts and improve editing skills at both the micro and macro levels.

A priority of our sessions is to ensure relevance to our participants. To that end, we will provide a variety of samples from different fields, cover academic conventions used across the disciplines, and aim to group researchers from similar fields together.

We will encourage our participants to start a new writing project or continue working on a previous project during the workshop in order to integrate input from the sessions. Participants will be invited to attend one-to-one meetings with the center tutors for consultations on their writing progress.*

* Participants will be entitled to one 30-minute consultation with a tutor per one session. These meetings can be booked through a scheduler that will be made available on the website. Please note the following about those consultations: 1) they should be a follow-up to input given in the sessions so that both the tutor and the participant quickly establish the focus of the feedback, 2) documents should be shared at the meeting, not before, and 3) proofreading or editing should not be expected in those meetings.

Click here for a detailed schedule.

Academic Writing Program Schedule

Please note that this schedule is subject to changes.