Introductions and unpacking reading in IT

Lynn's annotations of the journal article

The MICT writers' circle held its first session yesterday afternoon. After some short introductions and welcoming a few students who unfortunately were unable to attend the residential block last week, we launched into a somewhat meandering, but interesting, conversation about our reading and writing practices.

Thanks to Radford, who shared two pages of a journal article he was currently reading, we were able to do a mini-analysis of the form the language and writing. We were interested in gaining a deeper understanding of how such insight could help us make decisions about the merits of the article, evaluate its usefulness (for example, was it better to read it after gaining a better understanding of the topic, or would the article provide basic and introductory information about the topic), or learn about how the writing style, its order and sequencing was helping the authors communicate their ideas.
This short activity became the spring-board for some lively conversations about journal publication, how different disciplines understood or used common words or phrases (e.g. critical discourse analysis), different expectations that  supervisors have of students' writing, the function of an Introduction, differences between journal articles and books and the writing demands of the thesis vs journal article and how this might shape the structure and form of an Introduction.

NEXT TIME
14 August 2019 we will look at the requirements of your first assignments. Another topic everyone was keen to discuss is writing The Introduction.