How to Grad Student: Becoming an Effective Writer in Graduate School

This workshop will address time management strategies, and effective habits and motivation for early graduate school success.

Time management and productivity may not seem like an exciting topic, but harnessing concrete tactics and strategies for how to maintain autonomy and agency over your own schedule is a crucial skill in graduate school. You will find yourself juggling multiple, and often competing, priorities– and many of them have to do with writing… lots, and lots of writing! This 50-minute Rackham/Sweetland workshop will address time management strategies across scales (from pomodoros to physical planners to semester and year-long planning), as well as considerations regarding habits and motivation. The earlier you find what works for you, the more you can tailor your schedule to fit your life instead of the other way around! 

This workshop will address how you can read strategically to support your work as a writer in your academic field and discipline.

What is the relationship between reading and writing for academic purposes? How can you read to support your work as a writer in your specific academic field and discipline? In this 50-minute Rackham/Sweetland workshop, you will discover answers to these questions through guided reflection on your current reading (and writing) practices, as well as a hands-on introduction to specific reading strategies that support writing. You'll also leave with additional resources and ideas for how to continue to explore and develop the reading-writing connection in your own academic work.

This workshop will address how reading skills and writing conventions allow you to ethically represent others’ knowledge and support your arguments. Participants will work with peers to talk through rhetorical decisions scholars make when identifying and responding to interlocutors and set goals of how to use the workshop experience in their own graduate writing careers.

Learn tips for editing your own writing and explore the rhetorical effectiveness of stylistic elements commonly found in academic and professional writing, then practice applying these strategies to your work.

How can you catch grammatical or typographical errors before submitting your conference paper? How can you “sound” like yourself while maintaining a professional, academic voice in your dissertation? In this workshop, you will focus on applying editing strategies and stylistic choices in graduate writing. You will learn tips for editing your own writing and practice identifying common grammatical and typographical errors in writing samples. You will also explore the rhetorical effectiveness of stylistic elements commonly found in academic and professional writing and practice applying them to your own writing project. Writers should bring a current writing project to work on.