Academic Writing for Psychology Students

This is for the course “Critical Academic Writing” taught, in English, at the University of Warsaw’s Faculty of Psychology.

This course is designed to teach first-year MA students in psychology the skills necessary for academic writing in English in order to write a quantitative, high-quality MA thesis.

A high-quality MA thesis presents an argument based on facts and logic and thus has a clear contribution to the discipline and field of study.

The course will highlight important stages of the journey from research idea to MA thesis:

Structure and critique
Building productive writing habits
Hallmarks of good writing
Specific applications, namely, introduction, theory and hypotheses, and data and methods.

Students will learn how to efficiently and effectively collect, interpret, criticize, and synthesize information from multiple sources.

Critical Academic Writing_Guidelines for the Writing Assignments 2025 Download

Class 1. Introduction to Academic Writing

A. Understanding the audiences and purposes of academic writing; Contributions, i.e. answering, “so what?”

Required: “Leadership Lab: The Craft of Writing Effectively,” by Larry McEnerney, Director of the University of Chicago’s Writing Program

B. Structure of empirical research articles in psychology

Required: Appelbaum, M., Cooper, H., Kline, R. B., Mayo-Wilson, E., Nezu, A. M., & Rao, S. M. (2018). Journal article reporting standards for quantitative research in psychology: The APA Publications and Communications Board task force report. American Psychologist, 73(1), 3.

Optional: Harvard Writing Center “A Brief Guide to Writing the Psychology Paper”

Lecture Notes

Contributions: See “How to write the introduction.”

What is an empirical research article in the social sciences?

Philosophy of Writing: See How to think about academic writing in the social sciences

The American Psychological Association provides specific guidelines as to the structure of empirical research articles in psychology, including for qualitative research:

Levitt, H. M., Bamberg, M., Creswell, J. W., Frost, D. M., Josselson, R., & Suárez-Orozco, C. (2018). Journal article reporting standards for qualitative primary, qualitative meta-analytic, and mixed methods research in psychology: The APA Publications and Communications Board task force report. American Psychologist, 73(1), 26.

UC San Diego Psychology also has a good webpage on the structure of psychology articles.

Class 2. Writing Habits, Productivity, and Using AI Assistants

A. Using AI assistants and digital tools to improve your writing (e.g. ChatGPT, Google Bard Gemini, Claude, and Grammarly)

Required

Ghassemi, Marzyeh, Abeba Birhane, Mushtaq Bilal, Siddharth Kankaria, Claire Malone, Ethan Mollick, and Francisco Tustumi. “ChatGPT one year on: who is using it, how and why?” Nature 624, no. 7990 (2023): 39-41.
Key Questions for Journalists to Consider Before Using Generative AI by The Open Notebook

Optional: “How to Write With AI – Tyler Cowen” (2025)