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Target Audience: SBS Staff & PGR early in their academic writing careers

The Writing your First Paper Workshop will be suitable to staff and doctoral students who are early in their writing career and would like and benefit from relevant support and guidance on writing journal articles. It will be a variant of the standard writing workshop and retreat series.

Day 1 Writing Workshop – 10.00am-3.00pm

This workshop covers strategies for academic writing: writing to prompts, types of prompt for academic writing, ‘snack’ writing, goal-setting for writing, freewriting, generative writing, analysing academic writing, criteria, drafting and revising an abstract or summary, constructing a ‘contribution’ argument, using prompts in series, outlining, writing groups, micro-groups and retreats. Many of these can be used in preparing for a concentrated spell of writing at a writing retreat.

This is a practical workshop. The aim of the writing activities in this workshop is to let you try these strategies and consider how/if/where they can fit in your writing practice. We also discuss how they can be used for writing articles. They also let you start/work on your writing project during the workshop.

For more details on these writing strategies and others, see
Murray, R. (2019) Writing for Academic Journals, 4^th edition. Maidenhead: Open University Press-McGraw-Hill.
Murray, R. (2017) How to Write a Thesis, 4^th edition. Maidenhead: Open University Press-McGraw-Hill.

Day 2 Writing Retreat – 10.00am-3.00pm

This retreat aims to provide dedicated writing time and develop productive writing practices.

This structured retreat uses the ‘typing pool’ model. We all write at the same time, for fixed time slots, using goal-setting and peer and self-monitoring for our individual writing projects. Because we all write together, we can discuss our goals at the start and end of the day (10-15 minutes). Almost all the retreat time is writing time.

As well as progressing writing projects, the retreat will introduce participants to the Structured Writing Retreat model, provide insight into structuring a writing day and maintaining well-being during intensive periods of writing.

What you should bring?

A writing project to work such as an article (this can be in any stage of development).
Preparation such as researching your target journal/publisher/criteria and your topic.

Who will lead the course?

Professor Rowena Murray. Rowena is a highly respected facilitator of writing retreats and courses for academic writers. Her research focuses on academic writing, the subject of her books – How to Write a Thesis, Writing for Academic Journals, The Handbook of Academic Writing (co-authored with Sarah Moore) and Writing in Social Spaces – and articles in Higher Education journals. 

Prerequisites