Today, almost all theses are written in English, but there should ideally be a summary in Swedish. Swedish-language summaries are sometimes put forward as a key to the development and maintenance of a language of science and may be one of the few texts actually written in Swedish during a doctoral programme. At LTH, the abstract should be popular science. At other universities there are not the same requirements for a popular science text, but there are other texts, within and outside the universities, that are written in Swedish - the research proposal, the consultancy report, the press release and the environmental report.

Popularising research is an art, or at least a craft, that can be developed. Technical terms are part of the challenge, but there are other parts of writing that may be equally challenging, and many questions typically emerge in the writing process. What happens when we move between different genres and genres of writing between English and Swedish. How do we find the right level of abstraction? How do we target our texts? What terms do we use and why? How do we structure what we want to say?

In this course, we read, write and hope to be inspired to make our research understandable and exciting to people other than our colleagues. The aim of the course is to offer tools for developing writing, in Swedish and for a wide audience. We work with our ability to write both scientific and popular audiences and to reflect on genre differences.

The aim of the course is to offer course participants tools to develop and reflect on their science writing in Swedish for a varied audience. A specific goal is to increase participants’ awareness of publication norms and communicative strategies related to different popular science and science genres. The focus is on Swedish texts, but contrasts will be made to comparable texts in English.

Course schedule

Course plan