Workshop "Developing thinking skills for better writing"

Writing and reading skills are intertwined: a good writer has to be a good reader. But what does it mean to read well, especially when you have to process large volumes of text in limited time? What reading and thinking skills does a researcher rely on to decode, evaluate, and integrate other authors' texts? At the workshop, we will discuss critical thinking and analytical reading skills. Participants will explore and train such subskills as identifying key ideas, noticing syntactic and lexical markers, understanding logical connections at the sentence and paragraph level, and inference. Finally, we will look at summarizing based on the deep understanding of a text, which is an essential skill for writing a literature review.

Speaker: Natalia Fedorova, manager at the HSE Academic Writing Center, has over 15 years of experience in teaching English in a variety of contexts. She holds a degree in English Philology, Trinity CertTESOL (Trinity College London), CPE, and FTBE (Pearson). Her professional interests include EAP, ESP, teacher training, and project management in education.