#BUCPUA Hosts Academic Writing and Library Research Session

Dr. William Koehler gives a candid presentation over the importance of academic writing to #BUCPUA students and guests at the Academic Writing and Library Resource Session on Monday, September 27th.

On Monday, September 17, 2018, #BUCPUA hosted an Academic Writing and Library Research Session with Dr. William Koehler, Dean of the School of Business and Communication at Regis College, and Helen Lee (MUA ‘19), the Library Coordinator at the Pickering Educational Resources Library at the Wheelock College of Education. Students and guests of Dr. Madhu Dutta-Koehler’s UA 515 History, Theory, and Planning Practice course met to learn valuable techniques to enhance their academic writing.

Dr. Koehler’s presentation included topics on preparation, organization, purpose, and audience.

In his presentation, Dr. Koehler gave introductions on the different types of academic writings and how a student should approach each format, highlighting the ability to understand the purpose and audience of a piece. He emphasized how a well-formed process of writing an academic piece can make the end result much more coherent, keeping one’s thoughts organized from selecting a topic to creating an outline for the work.

Just as one should be meticulous when writing a piece, Dr. Koehler discussed how students should give the same attention to reading academic sources, scrutinizing them for the values and limitations of arguments, and using those skills to build their own strong arguments. The workshop concluded with Dr. Koehler working through examples of academic writing, as student applied what they had learned to their own assignments.

Helen Lee addresses the vast resources available to students, and how they best can navigate the BU library system.

Helen Lee gave students a virtual tour of library resources and how best to use those resources to their advantages. The presentation ranged from navigating the website to understanding the Library of Congress system that BU libraries use to categorize the 2.4 million physical volumes within their collections. With that, Ms. Lee emphasized the scope of the BU library system, for while many students automatically think of Mugar as the default library, BU has 12 libraries on campus, ranging from Questrom to Theology, all open to the entire BU community.

With this combination of research and writing strategies, students can be even more prepared for both their academic and professional pursuits.

Hannah Dion, CAS’20