From July 11 to 14, 2024, Professor Wenfan Yan from the University of Massachusetts Boston was invited to give a specialized course on “Academic Writing Skills and Standards” to our 2023 master’s and doctoral students. The course was hosted by Vice Dean Zhao Tingting.
Professor Yan Wenfan gave a step-by-step walk-through of the “five-chapter” thesis skeleton: introduction, literature review, methodology, findings, conclusion and discussion. He stressed that a good paper “makes the small speak for the large.” Using a case study—“dissecting one sparrow”—he showed how a tight, convincing analysis of a single, concrete example can expose a wider pattern and say something that matters. When it came to choosing a topic, he kept returning to three “real” tests: a real phenomenon, a real problem, and a real study. A usable topic must center on an actual puzzle that needs solving, and it has to be pinned down to a clear setting (the site), the people involved (the participants), and the core phenomenon itself. He urged students to get out of the library, look around, and check that the puzzle exists on the ground and can be tackled with the time and tools at hand. Case after case, he showed what this looks like in practice, letting the standards for solid academic writing speak for themselves.
Finally, Professor Yan Wenfan distilled his scholarly and life experience into an eight-word motto: “Be daringly original; make it hang together.” “Be daringly original,” he explained, means having the nerve to break fresh ground and refuse to be fenced in by received wisdom. “Make it hang together” means stitching every piece of evidence into a seamless, self-consistent whole so that the story you tell is airtight from first page to last.
Professor Yan spoke in plain language, lit up every idea with a story, and kept the room laughing while he did it. When the last slide faded, students said the same thing: they walked out with a toolbox they could actually use and a spark they had not felt before. The four days felt less like a class than like a match put to tinder—knowledge caught fire, ideas collided, and a clear path forward suddenly lit up for anyone ready to take the next research step.
