Dr Elsa João is Senior Lecturer and Director of Postgraduate Studies at Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of Strathclyde. She graduated in 1985 with a BSc in Environmental Engineering from the New University of Lisbon, Portugal, undertook an MSc in Geography at the University of North Carolina, USA and did her PhD in Geography at the University of London. In the UK she has taught at more than five Universities including the London School of Economics. At the University of Strathclyde in Scotland (where she has taught since 2001) she created and is the course leader of the first MSc in Environmental Entrepreneurship in Europe (http://www.strath.ac.uk/civeng/pg/enventrepreneurship/).
Dr João has expertise in the areas of Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA), Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), environmental analysis, Geographical Information Systems (GIS), scale effects, spatial data quality and enhancement of positive impacts. She is one of the academics leading SEA in the UK. Since 2002 she has trained more than 500 practitioners on SEA from more than 60 different organisations. Her current research focuses on how enhancement can improve project design & strategic planning. She is part of the newly created Scottish Government-sponsored Centre of Expertise for Climate Change, which includes more than 70 people from 18 different organisations in Scotland. She also contributes to the research of the sustainability category of the Scottish PLC awards.
In addition to her normal teaching duties in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, every January for the last five years she also teaches writing for the PhD thesis and for publication to more than 150 PhD students across all disciplines at the University of Strathclyde.
Writing skills for academic purposes
This talk will discuss key writing skills: writing up vs. writing down, plain language, editing, rewriting, literature review, structuring and style decisions. In particular the talk will attempt to destroy two great myths associated with writing for research: a) that you do the research first, and then, maybe years later, you write it up, and b) that what matters is correctness of content and facts; the way it is written, presented and structured does not really matter.