Refining the Quality of Scientific-Paper Writing in English
In order to help its students understand the importance of using English appropriately in writing thesis or other scientific papers, BINUS INTERNATIONAL (BI), together with PT Casio Indonesia organized a thesis workshop at the Joseph Wibowo Center campus, Senayan, on 5 September. Dr. Denny A. Kwary, the main speaker, was an English Literature lecturer from Airlangga University, Surabaya.
The event was attended by more than 20 students of BI School of Accounting and Finance, who are in their 3rd year and are preparing their theses.
Dewi Fitriasari, the Head of BI School of Accounting and Finance said that having knowledge and guidelines about making a scientific paper in English are very important. In BI, English is an absolute requirement for making the final project. The academic voice used in scientific papers is different with that of daily conversations.
“Many of the students could use English, but scientific work doesn’t use daily English. The usage is different. This is what the students needed to be equipped with,” Dewi explained.
Based on her daily observations on campus, almost 60% of the thesis supervisor’s time is spent on the technical aspects of the English usage in the paper. This is the thing that drove the campus and Casio to organize the thesis workshop.
Denny A. Kwany in his presentation told the students to be able to differentiate the usage of daily English and scientific language. Besides being able to pick the right words, the usage of right tenses and tone is also needed in writing scientific papers.
“Using the right tenses and tone would strengthen the scientific paper. That will definitely make writing the paper easier while convincing readers to understand further about your research results,” Denny said.
“As a campus that produces scientific papers like theses, in English, we have no option other than giving students knowledge to be able to produce a good English thesis. Organizing this kind of workshop is one way to do that,” Dewi explained. (RAW)
