The Writing Place

Writing peer reviews is excellent way for you to perform disciplinary service while exposing yourself to cutting edge research. Moreover, writing peer reviews provides you with the opportunity to learn how to fairly and accurately assess and critique the writing of scholars in your discipline. Finally, the peer review process provides you with an opportunity to better understand the genre- and stylistic-conventions that underlie writing in your discipline. This workshop will cover the nuts and bolts of how to write a peer review that is thorough, fair, and clear. It will also introduce you to various types of peer review (e.g., double blind, single blind) and provide information about how to begin getting involved in the peer review process.

Successful graduate students need to be able to make their research accessible to audiences both within their own specialty and outside of it. Whether the audience is a job search committee reading a cover letter, a funding organization reviewing a grant application, or friends at a dinner party, graduate students must be able to clearly communicate the topic, results, and impact of their research. This workshop will discuss how to convey academic research effectively in various settings. Topics covered include identifying audience, setting the appropriate tone, selecting relevant content, and packaging the information. You will have a chance to see and critique several examples of communication styles for audiences with varying levels of technical expertise. You will also get the opportunity to turn your research into a blurb for a lay audience and receive feedback from fellow participants.

Are you a graduate student who needs to write a diversity statement for the academic job market or a fellowship opportunity? Come to this workshop to discuss strategies for developing a strong and convincing diversity statement. The workshop will include a brief outline of strategies followed by discussion of sample diversity statements, and guided writing exercises as you begin to develop your own statement. All are welcome — whether you’ve drafted a statement or are just beginning to think about it!

A digital persona is a critical component of academic life. A bio on your department website, personal research page, professional blog, and networking profile (LinkedIn, Academia.edu) are among several integral spaces for the production and distribution of your scholarship, particularly for advanced graduate students and job candidates. The Internet has opened up the possibility for digital publishing (e.g., H-Net, MediaCommons) and blog commentating/reviewing, crucial platforms for aspiring scholars. Additionally, social media such as Facebook have opened up new avenues for networking and collaboration with other scholars. This workshop provides an introduction to these various digital media and best practices for management of your digital self. Exercises include brief surveys of other academics’ digital personas and examination of scholarly blogs. You will be encouraged to share their own experiences with digital content and profiles.

Tables. Graphs. Figures. Text. When incorporating quantitative data and results into a written text, which format is best? Moreover, how should tables, graphs, and figures be designed to clearly communicate ideas? This workshop will provide answers to such questions, as well as explain how standards for presenting data and information vary across fields. We’ll begin by discussing what types of information lend best to visual communication and what format works best for conveying particular ideas. We’ll also discuss how to balance words with images and graphic design to present information with clarity. Finally, we’ll explore strategies for writing about tables, graphs, and figures in the body of a report or article. 

A central component of graduate school is writing papers, theses, and dissertations, among other genres. In fact, there’s no way to graduate without drafting, editing, and revising these major forms of writing. However, many, if not all, graduate students struggle to produce writing and meet deadlines. How do you write three seminar papers in a single quarter? How do you also write a conference paper or an article on top of that? How do you draft an entire thesis or dissertation over months or years when you are used to drafting and editing papers in a matter of days? Finally, how do you actually hold yourself to deadlines? This workshop will address the challenges of getting the words on the page while also considering your calendar of personal and professional commitments. Topics to be covered include time management, goal setting, accountability, and understanding your individual preferences as a writer (e.g., what types of environments suit best facilitate your writing). You should come prepared to discuss your current list of writing projects as well as your average weekly routine and obligations apart from writing.

Graduate students pursuing publication in peer reviewed journals will sooner or later be confronted with a request to “Revise and Resubmit” an article. The revision and resubmission process can be tricky to navigate, as authors try to preserve what they take to be the essence of the paper’s contribution while at the same time responding effectively to the concerns and criticisms of the editor and reviewers. This workshop provides some general direction on how best to manage this delicate process. Participants will receive guidance in the following areas: (1) understanding the stages and timing of the publication process from initial submission through to production; (2) rewriting an article on the basis of reviewer criticisms, including those the author might disagree with; (3) making revisions in tandem with a co-author; (4) documenting revisions in a transparent and tactful manner for the ease of those evaluating the resubmitted manuscript; and (5) responding to the final decision. During the workshop participants will examine a variety of revision and resubmission case studies. Participants will also be encouraged to share their own experiences of the publication process.

Assigned readings for seminars. Books and articles for research. Professional journals that chronicle the biggest developments in your field. There’s a lot of material for academics to keep track of, much less read and take notes on. Given as much, this workshop is designed to help you get the most out of your limited time by offering strategies for reading and note taking that are not only efficient, but also can help you to better use these processes to the benefit of your writing. We’ll cover strategies for reading quickly and synthetically, as well as offer suggestions for identifying when something warrants reading slowly and carefully. Additionally, we’ll discuss how reading with an attention to the genres and styles of your discipline can help you to better understand how to incorporate and mimic such elements in your own writing. We’ll also talk through various methods for taking notes in ways that will lend well to ultimately writing about the materials you read.

One of the challenges that graduate school presents is learning to manage large writing projects like master’s theses and doctoral dissertations. Because of their scale, longer pieces of writing present unique difficulties. They require that students pay attention to the consistency, coherence, and overall aims of a project, even while working on its smallest details. Participants in this workshop will receive guidance about: 1) the overall stages and process of undertaking a large writing project; 2) how to stay focused on the overarching themes and goals of a project; 3) techniques for monitoring the internal consistency of one’s claims and style; and 4) how to develop outlines and utilize software in conceptualizing and organizing writing.

Developing and Delivering Conference Papers & Presentations

While most graduate students have developed a strong foundation in writing papers, another skill of equal importance for disseminating research findings is giving conference presentations. This workshop provides you with key strategies to successfully prepare and present your research at a conference. The workshop will cover several important considerations for presenting at conferences, including preparing slides, reducing your dependency on written prompts, discovering your natural presentation style, tips for engaging your audience and writing in a conversational manner, and advice for handling the question and answer session after the presentation.

Though the best writing benefits from the insights and feedback of others, there are numerous ways that you can effectively improve your own writing. With this goal in mind, this workshop will review a number of strategies for revising, editing, and proofreading your writing. We’ll begin by exploring techniques for tackling large-scale revisions for organization and clarity. Then, we’ll move on to consider methods for working with small-scale issues related to syntax, style, and grammar. In addition to learning a number of techniques, you will be provided with the opportunity to practice implementing these techniques on a writing sample and/or your own writing

Audiovisual and ephemeral objects (visuals and sounds, moving images, performances, fieldwork) are central to scholarship across many disciplines. For arts, humanities, and social science scholars, writing about audiovisual texts can be both a rewarding and uniquely challenging experience. Some of these challenges are specific to the vocabulary of each discipline, but many challenges relate to broader issues of turning visual evidence into written scholarly form. How can one effectively write about objects that appeal to sensory or temporal experience? How can scholars mediate between their own familiarity with an ephemeral object and their reader’s potential lack of access? How can an article or book effectively balance between necessary descriptions and the author’s original interpretations? While this workshop does not propose absolute answers to these questions, it does consider concrete strategies for managing translations of audiovisual analysis into written work. The workshop covers different approaches to effective note-taking, techniques for gathering and organizing evidence, and strategies for transitioning between description and analysis. Most importantly, this workshop encourages scholars from different disciplines to share their own strategies for notating and writing about visual works.

Reviews of academic monographs not only service the academic community by summarizing and evaluating recent scholarly work, but also offer graduate students the opportunity to cultivate a publishing profile and gain familiarity with the process of publishing in journals through short writing pieces. This workshop will explore how a well-strategized review has the potential to introduce a writer’s voice to their disciplinary field(s), preview the author’s forthcoming contributions in articles and manuscripts, and establish important scholarly networks. This workshop will also introduce a variety of formats for academic reviews and consider how to identify appropriate venues for publication, select books and articles for review, and structure the review itself. We will discuss how to balance synthesis of the text’s methods and arguments with critical evaluation, how to tactfully phrase your criticism, as well as useful strategies for tailoring your review for the publication’s primary academic audience.

When evaluating academic work, abstracts and titles are often the first (and sometimes the only) writing a reviewer encounters. This workshop begins with the basics, covering the essential information that both abstracts and titles must convey. We will then discuss how to approach abstracts of different lengths, specifically addressing what details should be contained in longer abstracts that are left out of shorter ones.  Finally, we’ll cover more nuanced topics such as: (1) balancing cleverness and creativity with clarity and keywords in titles; (2) cutting an abstract’s word count without compromising its message; and (3) how to avoid too much repetition when writing a series of ‘abstracts’ as part of a single job portfolio. You will be provided with abstracts and titles from a number of disciplines to evaluate and compare. You will also be encouraged to bring an abstract (either your own or someone else’s) from your discipline in order to apply learned techniques and principles to work in your field.

Your cover letter is the single most important element of your job application. Yes, search committees will likely eyeball your CV first; however, your cover letter gives you the opportunity to provide narrative depth to the accomplishments listed on your CV. Perhaps more important, your cover letter also allows you to tell potential employers why you are a good fit both for the position they advertise and for their department and institution as a whole. With the importance of cover letters as its central focus, then, this workshop will go over the basic components of academic cover letters as well as discuss what should (and should not) be included in a letter. We will also offer tips and strategies for how to best tailor your cover letter to a specific job call, and participants will practice analyzing sample job calls as a way of beginning to consider what they might highlight in their own cover letters. Finally, we’ll provide participants with a bibliography of further resources as well as sample cover letters from a variety of disciplines for reference.

Compiling and synthesizing literature as a justification for one’s own research is a key element of most academic work. Nonetheless, both the strategies and components of literature reviews vary based on the genre, length, and prospective audience of a text. This workshop will help participants compose their literature review, focusing on structure and organization and how to write effective and specific reviews. Activities will include: (1) balancing summary with interpretation and (2) choosing descriptive words carefully and accurately. Additionally, participants will be given the chance to scrutinize and apply what they have learned to a sample literature review.