Teaching Tip: Demystify academic writing through guided reverse engineering
Help students uncover how research articles are built, sentence by sentence and paragraph by paragraph, by guiding them through the underlying model before they begin writing their own.
Struggling to teach students what lies behind a typical research paper or report?
Students are used to reading academic writing. For example, they recognise the standard structure for scientific papers, such as introduction, methods, results, and discussion. However, many treat creating their own academic writing as guesswork, failing to connect ideas logically. It can feel as though students are being asked to produce a finished building without ever seeing the blueprint. A guided, inquiry-based activity can make the underlying model visible, thereby changing a student’s experience and the quality of their output.
Try this!
Run a guided reverse engineering session. Give students:
- A short, published research article or excerpt
- A blank writing model, such as the four-part Introduction model or the IMRaD sequence
Working in small teams, students first predict what belongs in each part of the model. They then map the real article onto it, sentence by sentence. Through this comparison, they uncover the conventions, functions, and logic of research writing rather than being told them.
This activity is adapted from Dr Andrea Kolb’s teaching innovation in CHEMMAT 724: Advanced Materials Characterisation, where students used a booklet with fill-in-the-blank exercises to discover the standardised research writing model described by Glasman-Deal [1]. This prepared them to write a mock scientific research article with confidence and clarity using their real lab data.
Image: AI-generated with Gemini
Why this helps
- Students see how ideas flow and why sections are shaped the way they are.
- They gain a model they can transfer to new assignments and disciplines.
- Students with limited writing experience benefit from a clear and accessible scaffold.
- Writing performance improves, as seen in CHEMMAT 724, where students who engaged with the activity produced stronger research-based assignments.
Implementation
- Choose a short and well-structured article or a one-to-three-page excerpt.
- Prepare a blank writing model, such as the four-component Introduction model: establishing importance, summarising previous work, identifying a gap, and announcing the present paper.
- Introduce the task as discovery-based, explaining that students will work out the model by analysing a real writing paragraph by paragraph.
- Run the activity in small groups for forty-five to sixty minutes or as a take-home assignment. Students annotate, discuss, and align each sentence or section with the functions in the model.
- Debrief as a whole class. Highlight what students noticed about structure, language cues, and the purpose of each section.
This activity works particularly well when paired with a graded writing assignment, so students can directly apply what they discovered.
Pro tips
- Provide guiding questions such as “Is this background information, a gap, or a claim”, “Why has the writer placed this information here”, or “What is this sentence doing”.
- Begin with a discipline-specific article so the content feels familiar.
- Use a low-stakes follow-up assignment where students apply the model to a new example. This was effective in CHEMMAT 724.
- Encourage students to compare their mapped models with peers to refine their understanding.
Benefits
- Students understand what each section does, not only what it contains, demonstrating their ability to think critically.
- Writers feel less overwhelmed because they can see the blueprint behind the final text.
- Students who lack prior experience in research writing gain confidence and direction.
- The model becomes a portable scaffold they can use in later courses, research tasks, and professional settings.
“Walking through published articles sentence by sentence and identifying the purpose of each sentence helps students produce strong first drafts simply by following the writing model. I am consistently impressed by how well they apply the blueprint once they understand it.” Andrea Kolb
Try this variation
- Ask students to map the structure of a conference slide deck instead of a written article.
- As a flipped classroom or tutorial activity, have them compare examples from two different courses.
- Follow up with a short task where students draft one section of their own work using the model.
- Use a Lucid board for digital mapping if working in a fully online or hybrid classroom.
Gen‑AI considerations
- Invite students to generate a draft outline using a Gen-AI tool and then critically compare it with the class model.
- Ask students to annotate how they revised AI suggestions to meet the model’s expectations.
- Emphasise that Gen-AI should support analysis, not replace critical thinking or original writing.
Accessibility considerations
- Provide digital and print versions of templates and examples.
- Include guiding questions to support students with writing anxiety.
- Offer alternative modes such as audio mapping or visual sketching.
Further reading
[1] Harry Glasman-Deal. Science Research Writing: For Native and Non-Native Speakers of English. 2nd ed. London: World Scientific Publishing Europe Ltd., 2021. https://doi.org/10.1142/q0232
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Faculty: Science
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Shared by
Andrea Kolb
Professional Teaching Fellow
Faculty of Engineering and Design