Mastering academic writing. Writing for the Reader: Resolving Structural and Stylistic Frictions

Attendance: in person

This workshop addresses the common challenges researchers face when translating complex philosophical thought into written form. Often, philosophical writing suffers from being "writer-centric", i.e. focused more on the internal process of discovery than on the reader. Because the discipline deals with high levels of abstraction, failing to account for "reader-awareness" can leave even a solid argument inaccessible.

Over three 90-minute sessions, we will diagnose and tackle these recurring issues. We will move beyond sentence-level corrections to focus on higher-order concerns: fragmented structure, opaque argument development, and frictions caused by differing writing cultures (Continental vs. Anglo-Saxon). Participants will learn to reverse-engineer successful texts to identify the rhetorical strategies that create clarity without sacrificing depth.

The workshop is practical. You will work directly with your own drafts to identify personal writing blind spots. We will also address academic pitfalls such as "zombie nouns" (nominalizations) and the ineffective use of passive voice. You will leave with a concrete toolkit for producing philosophical writing that is both theoretically rigorous and highly readable.

The course will be led by Martin Sedláček from the Department of Language Studies at the Czech Language Institute (Czech Academy of Sciences).

The in-person training will take place in the FLÚ meeting room. Capacity is limited to 14 participants.

Registration is required to attend the seminar.

 The course is primarily intended for junior researchers at the Institute of Philosophy; however, due to available capacity, we are opening the training to all.