This online workshop addresses junior and senior scholars from the social sciences and humanities who have good command of the English language, seek to improve their English writing skills, and strive to make their academic papers more idiomatic. The workshop seeks to create an awareness of the typical patterns of non-idiomatic writing to which non-native authors writing in English – and especially German-speaking academics – are prone and equip the participants with strategies to avoid these pitfalls.

The workshop comprises four half-day sessions (3.5–4 hours each) and will be conducted in English by two trainers who have a professional background in the social sciences and many years of experience in teaching English academic writing and in translating and editing academic texts by German-speaking scholars.

• You will be aware of some of the important characteristics of the English language that will help improve your writing.
• You will be conscious of some of the pitfalls that especially German speakers are vulnerable to when writing in English and be familiar with strategies to avoid them.
• You will be able to use this knowledge to develop a more fluent and lively style of writing.
• You will be familiar with a wide range of resources, aids, and strategies to help you improve your writing.

• Effective introduction for scientific lectures
• Parameters of nonverbal communication: Effective gestures,
  dominant body language and self-confident appearance
• The power of the voice: Intonation and speech form
• Flexible use of rhetorical means and optimization of expression
• confident handling of disturbances, critical questions and mishaps:
  Strategies and response formulas
• How to generate attention and create a positive atmosphere
• Communicate core messages clearly and structure content
• The Lincoln technique, segmenting the audience and CFA to exit
• “The salt in the soup”: Mode change for lively presentations
• Best practice examples from the USA and Great Britain; literature and
  Video recommendations

Due to the Corona-Crisis the following workshop was transferred into an online-seminar and simulates the traditional physical event as closely as possible. The seminar is streamed via Zoom and contains online and offline parts.

Poster sessions are an integral part of almost every scientific conference. Their purpose is to highlight research results, visualise them, and stimulate discussion. To draw your audience in, you need a crystal-clear message, 
a text format optimized for best legibility and well-chosen graphics. And above all, you need to think well through how to organize your research content on the huge A0 poster format.

Basic rules of graphic design and layout technique will help you to present your work in a visually well-structured and appealing way. The training shows you how to present your research efficiently and provides enough time to put directly into practice what you have learned.

For many scientists, writing job applications tends to be quite difficult, especially for jobs beyond the academic system. In fact, misapprehensions and mistakes in the application dossier often prevent them from securing jobs they are perfectly suited for. This workshop will help you write a convincing application.