Supervising Academic Writing for Supervisors of the GSNS and GSLS
In the fall, the Communication Skills Academy offers the course Supervising Academic Writing, designed to support you in supervising, teaching and refining academic writing in the natural and life sciences. The course provides an opportunity to strengthen your ability to guide students effectively and revisit the fundamentals of academic writing and effective feedback, and explore new insights and emerging tools, including the transformative potential of AI. The course will help you enhance your supervising and your students’ learning.
Effective guidance for better academic writing
As a supervisor, from postdoc to full professor, you may find yourself investing significant time and effort in helping students and PhD candidates improve their academic writing, but it can be difficult to assess whether this guidance is truly effective. Writing is an essential element of research, yet it remains a common challenge for many PhD candidates. As their supervisor, are you confident in identifying the root causes of writing struggles, and do you know the best strategies to address them? Gaining insight into writing techniques allows you and your student to develop a shared vocabulary, which in turn makes it easier and more efficient to communicate about the writing process and give feedback. The course Supervising Academic Writing ensures your guidance translates into stronger, independent student writing.
Learning goals
Throughout the course Supervising Academic Writing, you will gain insight and skills that allow you to:
• Differentiate and apply effective feedback strategies for targeted improvement
• Identify and address common writing issues in your students’ work
• Support effective writing planning and organisation
• Improve readability and academic writing quality of your students’ work
• Use writing analysis tools and techniques to evaluate and improve texts
• Critically evaluate (and apply) GenAI in academic writing
• Facilitate peer learning and feedback processes.
The supervisor course is particularly suitable for to postdocs, lecturers (UDs), assistant and associate professors, full professors, principal investigators (PIs), and others in similar roles who are supervising PhD candidates. The course is not suitable for PhD candidates; for information about writing courses for PhD's, please see our Course page. Supervisors should be associated with the GSLS or GSNS graduate schools. Self-study takes place in our online course environment in ULearning and will involve weekly self-study tasks that can be completed at any day/time that suits you. This keeps the threshold for taking the course as low as possible. All meetings will be highly interactive, offering plenty of opportunities to learn from your colleagues and instructor.
Practical matters and registration
The estimated time expenditure for this course is 3 hours self-study per week, plus meeting preparation. There are three (online) meetings in each course. There will be 2 editions of the course; each course can accommodate up to 10 participants.
Group 1: start 5 October 2026. Meeting dates (online):
- 15 October 9.30-11.00h
- 29 October 9.30-11.00h
- 12 November 9.30-11.00h
Group 2: start 26 October 2026. Meeting dates (online):
- 3 November 11.30-13.00h
- 17 November 11.30-13.00h
- 1 December 11.30-13.00h
The course is offered free of charge. However, your full commitment is required. If you apply for the course but decide not to participate, please find someone who can take your place, or inform us at the latest 4 weeks before the start of the course, so we can offer your spot to someone else. Late cancellations still incur costs for our instructors and disadvantages those who wanted to attend but can no longer make at such late notice.