Writing Workshops

Overview

The writing workshop program offers writing workshops to support a wide variety of learning goals. We will work with you to determine the best way to integrate these workshops, tailoring the number, timing, content, and format to meet your needs.

Your engagement is crucial. When the classroom professor helps to integrate the writing instruction with the course content, students begin to understand that “doing in the discipline” and “writing in the discipline” are not separate processes. Considerable research on writing supports the need for disciplinary faculty to help students understand the underlying values and patterns of reasoning that guide discourse norms in the discipline.

Here’s how you can help students see the connection between writing and doing:

• Make the assignment as “real” as possible. Choose writing assignments that someone in your discipline would actually do.
• Explain the purposes of various forms of writing in your discipline.
• Describe what factors contribute to effective writing in your discipline (e.g. brevity and style).
• Clearly emphasize that good writing is valued in the discipline.
• Collaborate with us to align your learning goals with the workshops.
• Attend workshops to participate in discussions, answer questions, and work with us to show students how the skills are used in your discipline.

We will be happy to discuss these issues in more detail during our initial meetings with you.

Schedule

In order to make workshop integration as smooth as possible, and to improve every semester, we ask that you:

• Complete the Complete the Integrating Writing Workshop Questionnaire. (PDF)
• Participate in an initial planning meeting.
  • Earlier is always better, but we need at least two weeks notice before the first workshop.
  • Last minute-workshops can occasionally be accommodated, especially in the context of an established course relationship, but we cannot guarantee this.
• Touch base quickly after the workshop about what went well and what might need to be modified.
• Participate in an end-of-semester wrap-up meeting to review how things went and document potential opportunities for improvement or expansion.
• Respond to the end-of-semester survey about your experience.

Workshops

Writing workshops that we commonly offer include:

• Reading critically in the discipline
• Writing to audience and determining audience needs
• Developing research questions
• Developing a thesis or a main focus
• Analyzing sample papers to understand disciplinary patterns of argument and conventions
• Language conventions in the discipline and use of “stock phrases”
• Converting oral to written reports and vice-versa
• Strategies for avoiding plagiarism while working with material you don’t yet understand
• Learning how to interpret feedback and revise effectively
• Developing an action plan for revision
• Overall organizational conventions: what goes where, length, etc.
• Cohesion, paragraphing, and flow
• Using grammar and punctuation to emphasize meaning