Writing critical literature review in geotechnical engineering

Abstract

The main concern of this research was assisting postgraduate students when they write in the disciplines. Therefore, the efficacy of some ideas for supervising novice writers in Geotechnical Engineering were qualitatively investigated. To meet the research objective, a series of supervisory sessions that were done in Google Docs were observed and the interactions between the supervisor and the supervisee were thoroughly analyzed. This study showed that online tools such as Google Docs could facilitate learning to write in Geotechnical Engineering through comparing good writing samples and supervisor-student discussion. These activities led to discovering genre features and developing better understanding of the revising stage. This study suggests that using Google Docs to facilitate the interactions between supervisors and supervisees could improve the fluency and the content of writing in the disciplines. Such breakthroughs introduced a new dimension in supervising student writers.