Thinking about your Writing Process PhD Student Induction – Wednesday 10 th October 2012

1. Thinking about your Writing ProcessPhD Student Induction – Wednesday 10th October 2012 Dr Teresa McConlogue Thinking Writing t.mcconlogue@qmul.ac.uk

2. About you… • Are you a Science PhD student? • Are you a Humanities PhD student? • Are you a Medical PhD student? • Have you written a document (any document) over 20,000 words long?

3. Start writing early • Think of an key idea, concept that you will explore in your thesis. • Take a piece of paper and write the idea/concept at the top of the paper. • Then spend two minutes writing about this key idea/concept. • When you’ve finished, share your writing with your partner.

4. Be aware of your writing process 1. Summarize the process you usually use to write. 2. How much do you plan ahead before you begin to write? 3. When you write, do you revise immediately, piece by piece before you write additional text? Do you save revision until all the text in a particular section has been written? Do you revise at all? What sort of revision do you do? 4. What aspects of writing do you find most difficult? • Generating ideas? • Developing a main idea or position? • Doing research? • Beginning the paper? • Organizing the paper? • Providing transitions? 5. Are you happy with your writing process? Do you find it effective? Is there some aspect of it you would like to change? (from Writing the Successful Thesis and Dissertation: Entering the Conversation by Irene L. Clark)

5. Get Support! • Help Zone English and Academic Drop-ins where students can get brief guidance and answers to quick questions with no appointment necessary. See http://www.library.qmul.ac.uk/help_zone_English • One-to-One Academic Study Tutorials, available to any Queen Mary student at any level – foundation, undergraduate and postgraduate, home and international - of any discipline. http://www.library.qmul.ac.uk/academic_study_tutorials • Royal Literary Fund (RLF) Fellows offer one-to-one writing tutorials to students from any discipline and at any level. http://www.library.qmul.ac.uk/royal_literary_fund • Writing Retreats for postgraduate students - several times each year - and for undergraduate students - run in conjunction with departments. A ‘writing retreat’ provides structured writing time to help you set goals, give and receive feedback, manage your time - and get lots of writing done! Contact Kelly Peake (k.peake@qmul.ac.uk) • Insessional courses for postgraduate students are organised by the Language Centre, part of the School of Languages, Linguistics and Film. • Research Writing Workshops, part of the insessional offer, is a module aimed at PhD students  at various stages of writing a dissertation. Workshop activities will give students the opportunity to scrutinise their writing, where necessary focussing closely on techniques for improving structure, coherence, referencing, grammatical accuracy and word choice.  Students will be encouraged to think about the process of writing and how they can develop effective methods for getting writing done and for revising what they have written. • See http://www.sllf.qmul.ac.uk/languagecentre/current/Insessional%20English/index.html for details of the insessional programme.