Permalink : http://hdl.handle.net/2115/42866

Since April 2009, a new approach to teaching Academic Writing has been developed as a project of applied philosophy. This approach aims to improve graduate student's academic writing skills by improving their logical thinking skills rather than merely language skills. Under this approach, teachers of the Academic Writing course are mainly philosophers, and students of the course are required to learn how to form logically valid arguments rather than just grammatically correct sentences. The objective of this paper is to explain why it is important to learn logical thinking skills for academic writing, and how philosophers can deliver that kind of training. In section 2, we shall explain why the training of logical thinking skills is important for writing academic papers by highlighting a common misunderstanding about academic writing. In section 3, we shall show how the training of logical thinking skills can be practically applied. In section 4, we shall present the results achieved by our academic writing course so far (between April and October 2009).