Bad news: You missed a lot

Warm May weekends tempt us to leave the bustle of the city and relax in the countryside. However, the colleagues who chose to spend a Saturday at the one-day course “Master Academic Vocabulary” with Tatiana Golechkova didn’t regret a single minute.

The Academic Writing Center ran this course for the third time on May 16. This time, the participants evaluated the course itself and the trainer’s expertise at 10 out of 10! Such enthusiasm might seem unexpected. Don’t we have a plethora of AI tools at our disposal to check and improve vocabulary usage in our writing, as well as to translate unfamiliar words in others’s texts? Why bother learning? 

Firstly, dealing with AI tools also requires certain knowledge and skills. The course provided an opportunity to practice working with different tools and writing effective prompts for high-quality output. But most importantly: are you prepared to delegate decision-making to neural networks and let them define your writing style and your vocabulary range? 

If your answer is “no,” make sure to join the course next time - and get inspiration from the course participants’ feedback: 

• “I learned how to use not just traditional dictionaries, but also corpus tools, thesaurus resources, and AI chatbots with specific prompts to check collocations, register, and usage patterns.
• “The course was tightly focused, and every exercise served a clear purpose in building vocabulary awareness. Before this course, I focused mainly on meaning and spelling. Now I understand that knowing a word involves much more. This has fundamentally changed how I approach vocabulary learning.”
• “The course taught me to categorize vocabulary for "passive use" (recognition – meaning, pronunciation, spelling) versus "active use" (production – collocations, grammar, connotations, register). This helps me prioritize what to memorize deeply vs. what to just recognize.”

According to our visitors, one-day courses are highly convenient because you can devote meaningful time and undivided attention to one aspect you want to focus on. We invite you to browse the AWC website in August and choose programs that can become stepping stones in your individual professional development trajectory.