Riding the roller coaster: engaging with feedback to improve your writing 

27th Mar 2019 10:00am-4:30pm 

Venue: Royal Holloway, 11 Bedford Square, WC1B 3RF

Booking: to book please email techne@rhul.ac.uk

 

How does feedback on your writing make you feel? Many writers are familiar with the roller-coaster of emotions that feedback can provoke - pride and disappointment, delight and despair, soaring happiness and blind rage. The emotional aspects of feedback are rarely explored and yet can have an enormous impact on the trust between students and staff that is so important for learning. Comments on writing directly impact on your sense of yourself as an academic writer and can knock hard-won confidence built up over many years.

In this one-day workshop, we explore different ways of managing the emotions generated by feedback so they don't become obstacles to improving the quality of our writing. After the session, you will be:

• more conscious of the emotions feedback can provoke

• more aware of how these emotions can obstruct your writing progress

• better able to understand how your ideas about yourself as a writer can affect the way you interpret feedback

• equipped with strategies to help you move forward

• better prepared for feedback conversations focussed on improving writing in your discipline

• more confident about taking an active role in the feedback dialogue

• more aware of, and secure in, your identity as an academic writer

 

Anne Wilson has a background in journalism (features) and corporate communication (scripts, speeches, screen media copy), combining her writing with facilitating writing workshops in HE. A Fellow of the Higher Education Academy, she was Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Brunel University for three years, and now runs workshops on academic writing and professional communication for postgraduates and staff at Brunel and other universities. She also coaches students for the 3MT competition (won by Brunel in 2017). She has collaborated with the Brunel Occupational Therapy department to investigate what kind of feedback helps students to improve their academic writing and is currently running staff and student workshops on managing feelings about feedback.