Academic Writing
In higher education the students are expected to develop proficiency in reading and writing academic text. This ability entails the technical skills, like using citations and referencing, but also meta cognitive skills such as critical reflection of the acquired information and choice of vocabulary and language.
The learning objective of this part of the course is to learn how to produce academic style of text, to refer to different sources, to differentiate own conclusions of referred knowledge and to scope the research and writing work to given frames.
This skill is directly transferable to working life, e.g. for creating expert blogs, white papers or other material for different audiences.
How do I pick the topic? What can I write about?
Choosing the topic
Think about what topics are you interested in? On what subjects could you think of working with in the future? What do I want to know more about?
The only restriction is it needs to be something related to digital business.
Some example topics:
-
Visual Marketing Channels of Street Fashion in Finland
-
Creating Online Community for Charity
-
VR (virtual reality) in Digital Health - Case: Pain Care
-
Guide to social media marketing for entrepreneurs (almost zero budget)
-
Outlook for use of Artificial Intelligence in customer service
Get your topic approved by the coach of the course.
How do I scope my work? How much do I need to know?
Scoping and Planning
Scoping the topic of your report means also matching the amount of work you will put into the research work. Studying some example reports will help you to get idea how deep you can dive into the topic you have chosen.
See the study credits the academic writing part of the course is worth in the course overview.
Usually it helps to structure your writing by starting with the table of contents. Once the structure is logical, it is easier to to start the information gathering. Some information to start with you may find in the Content Picks section.
See example reports here.
How do I write? What is the right style? What should the report look like?
Referencing and Templates
The most important things in academic writing are the authenticity of the text, the distinction between your own thoughts and the thoughts of others (your references), the process of writing and the style how the text is written. These topics are explained in detail in Laurea's referencing guide and in the report template. We use the same report template as is used for final thesis.
You can find the referencing guide and the report template here.