Introduction to“Logical Thinking Skills for Academic Writing”

“Logical Thinking Skills for Academic Writing” is the name of an annual workshop series that has been conducted at the central library of Nagoya University since 2014. It also represents a new construction approach to the education of logical thinking for academic writing, which primarily focuses on how a logical argument can be actually constructed for an argumentative paper from scratch.* The aim of this paper is to introduce the new construction approach through three main topics covered by the workshops. The first is to explain why a logical argument is needed for research writings such as a graduate dissertation, and point out where exactly the argument is needed in a dissertation. The second is to show how to build a primitive research claim for a dissertation, and turn it into the basis of the clarity and originality of the research paper. The third is to highlight how to practically build the premise to prove the claim, and hint how the premise and claim can be developed into a full-blown logical argument.