Academic writing
Engineers and architects need strong communicative skills to be able to interact with stakeholders, clients and colleagues. There are some general requirements for academic writing, but there may also be other requirements for certain disciplines. On these pages, we give you an overview of the tools you as a student or employee can use to improve your writing and other communication skills.
At KTH Library, there are supervisors who can help you develop your writing or rhetorical skills, such as presentation techniques. The supervisors work within the Center for Academic Writing & Rhetoric (CAW/CAS) (at Language and Communication at KTH ). Students at all levels can be helped to improve their texts and oral presentations during individual consultations.
We offer support for both Swedish and English assignments.
During our free individual consultations, a supervisor will help you get started, deal with and overcome writing blocks or performance anxiety, or learn strategies for word processing and how you can work with proofreading on your own.
More useful tools can be found under Oral communication support and Resources .
Workshops
During the semesters, we offer workshops in various aspects of academic writing and communication. The workshops can be aimed at students, or researchers and doctoral students at KTH.
Request a workshop
Students are also welcome to send an e-mail to cas-handledning@kth.se to requests workshops in writing and presentations (for example for your meetings in project or student groups). Themes for workshops can be, for example, designing effective visuals, practicing your presentation (eg project presentation, report presentation or opposition talks) and learning to communicate in accordance with norms and conventions within a specific subject area.
Avoid cheating and plagiarism
An important reason to keep track of how to use academic writing in practice is that you must not plagiarize by mistake or on purpose.
Read more about cheating and plagiarism
Resources to use on your own
Dictionaries
- For Swedish, we recommend the Swedish Academy's dictionaries to look up what words mean or how they are pronounced.
- For English, you can use the Oxford Dictionaries , Cambridge Dictionary and the University and College Council's dictionary .
- KTH also has its own Swedish-English dictionary .
Phrase banks
Writing scientifically can sometimes feel unusual. Phrase banks can be helpful because they give you examples of sentences and scientific expressions that you can then use or rework to suit your own text.
- In Swedish, you can use Karolinska Institutet's Frasbanken .
- In English, you can use the Manchester Academic Phrasebank .
Term banks
As an engineer, it is important that you know what different terms are called in different languages, especially English. Here you can use the official term banks available in Sweden and Europe:
About academic writing
- The KTH guide to scientific writing Academic writing (Academic Writing Support at Karolinska Institutet)
You can find even more tools under Resources .