1. History and Background of the Course
“Logical Thinking Skills In Academic Writing’’ was first launched in April 2009 at Hokkaido University as a graduate school common course HI ). It was designed by the author and three other philosophers to teach graduate students how to
write clearly and convincingly, with an ultimate objective to increase the number of academic publications produced by the students.
Publication was indeed a serious problem facing graduate students at Hokkaido University. The students were required to publish one or two papers in order to be eligible for graduation, but most of them had problems fulfilling the requirement. The reason was fundamentally to do with the lack of a proper education in academic writing.
Before the launch of our course, there was not any academic writing course for graduate students at Hokkaido University. Although some workshops on academic writing were held regularly, they provide only superficial information on the styles and forms of academic writing. Many graduate students found the workshops “boring” and “frustrating”, and we often heard them voicing basically the same complaint: “If I want to know the format of writing a cover letter, I can search the Internet and learn it by myself. Why should I waste my valuable research time coming here for something that I can learn by myself at home?”
Indeed, academic writing education in Japanese universities is implemented mainly as a part of foreign language education program (Lai 2013), targeting at students who are not writing in their first language. The language program is helpful for the second language writers to gain a basic understanding about how to write their papers using a new language. It may be even helpful for those writers to learn how to make their writings looked more professionally; hence creating “a credible image as a competent member of [a] chosen discipline” (Swales &Feak 2012, p. 1). But such a program is not very helpful for graduate students who are writing for publication. For publication, what the students need is not a writing course that covers only styles and forms, nor a language course that is primarily designed for second language writers. What they need is a specialized training in how to communicate their research ideas in a clear and convincing manner. Meeting this demand was the motivation of our course.
On the first day when the course commenced, the fifty-seat classroom was fully packed, and many latecomers had to be turned away. But even fifty students were too many for US. Eventually we had to select just thirty students based on their reason for taking the course. Most of them stayed with US for the whole year, and at the end of the first year, 20% of these students succeeded in having their paper accepted for publication (Lai 2010).
In 2011 the course was moved and launched at Nagoya University based on the same objective and pedagogy. Once again, the classroom was fully packed on the first day of the course. Once again only thirty students were selected to take the course. At the end of the one-year course, twelve of the thirty students succeeded in having their papers accepted for publication at an international level. Among the publishable papers, one was awarded the Best Paper Prize at an international conference, and another was a journal paper published at the science journal, Nature,