Year 2 Online Writing Retreat
9th Mar 2022 10:00am - 10th Mar 2022 3:30pm
To attend this course please book on Inkpath. Inkpath is an app available to all Techne students, if you're not already using please click here to find out how to get started.
Year 2 Online Writing Retreat
Running on Zoom from 10am to 3.30pm on 9th & 10th March 2022.
Year 2 of a PhD is, for many, a time of feeling overwhelmed and making tough choices from a wealth of material. This two-day writing retreat (for any PhD researcher who is currently writing, e.g. for an 'upgrade', or writing chapters) is an opportunity to scrutinise your writing through specific lenses: critical analysis, argument, voice, language and line by line sentence structure. You will also get a one-to-one consultation with either Anne or Katie.
Before the retreat, we will ask you to choose a specific piece of writing to work on over the two days. You will apply each lens (critical analysis, argument etc.) to this particular piece of writing. The writing can be at any stage - a set of notes, first draft, or an almost finished section or chapter. It needs to be enough to merit two days of your time, but short enough for you to make significant progress. This approach brings into focus your core argument and the techniques you use to communicate ideas. At the end of the retreat, you will be better able to choose what is important, and you will develop skills you can apply throughout your thesis.
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. 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 recently collaborated with the Brunel Occupational Therapy department to investigate what kind of feedback helps students to improve their academic writing.
Katie Grant co-created the Advancing Academic Writing skills website for the University of Glasgow, where she was the Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow for three years, helping undergraduates, Masters and PhD students with their writing. A columnist, occasional broadcaster, author of ten novels (Sedition, her latest, is published by Virago), chair of the judges for the Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction and an occasional book reviewer for, amongst other publications, the New York Times, she runs writing workshops on improving the quality, reach and impact of academic writing for all levels of HE. Long experience of the practical, emotional and organisational challenges of writing for deadlines and for different audiences informs all her workshops. She understands from first-hand the value of getting writing done and getting it done well.