Rackham/Sweetland Workshops on Writing - Winter 2026

This workshop seeks to assist participants in realizing their writing voice and how it relates to academic conventions of formality and genre.

Do you feel that your academic writing should “sound” a certain way? Have you been told to alter the way your thoughts show up on the page? Depending on the rhetorical situation, audience, and medium, our writing voice adopts different formalities. During this workshop, we’ll unpack how tone, syntax, and diction intertwine to encompass our individual writing style. We’ll begin by understanding your thought processes through presenting ideas in your own way, then moving through exercises that will guide you through how to incorporate feedback while maintaining uniqueness and clarity.

In this workshop, participants will bring a personal research project to assess or map out a citation policy that reflects their commitments and values.

Sara Ahmed tells us that “citations can be feminist bricks: they are the materials through which, from which, we create our dwellings.” Our citation policies “affec[t] the kind of house” in which we spend our intellectual lives (Living a Feminist Life 15). In this workshop, participants begin by reflecting on their various commitments and values before engaging in a discussion of the shared reading. The session concludes with individual and collaborative workshop time targeting feasibility in their designs. Participants assess citations in a recent project to determine the extent to which they have used citations to build the kind of “dwelling” they want to occupy and explore options for further renovating. Alternatively, participants may bring a project they have not yet researched fully in order to map a citation policy for that project.

Qualifiers: This is a workshop especially designed for those in the humanities, social and applied sciences. Before the workshop, we ask that you read an eight-page excerpt (sent to those who register) from Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life.