Hone Your Literacy Skills with the Academic Writing Center

The Academic Writing Center (AWC) is hosting another season of workshops to help you with all things related to writing at the graduate level. We as graduate students are required to develop a unique set of literacy skills when navigating graduate-level writing. We must not only tackle big projects such as dissertations and academic essays, but also be able to market ourselves through resumes, CVs, covers letters, and so on. This workshop series will take you through all of these topics and more to arm you with the tools and knowhow to excel at any form of graduate writing.

Emily Rose Cole, the AWC’s graduate assistant who is curating this workshop series, says that “The writing center director and I are coming at it from the perspective of language being alive, and we’re excited to talk about this subset of language in that context.” There is something here for everyone; no matter what stage of your academic career you are in, you’ll be able to take something useful and applicable from these workshops. 

The series will begin by covering how to improve grammar and create professional documents such as the statement of purpose and CV. New to this series is a focus on scholarly publication (i.e., getting your own work published), which will give a multidisciplinary look at the publishing process of academic journals. Getting published is an important to being taken seriously as an academic, no matter the discipline. “The idea behind the publishing workshop is that academic publishing can be terrifying and we’re going to try to demystify it,” Emily says. 

The series will end on a topic that will be pertinent to nearly all of us: procrastination. This workshop will take place in March, which is when the semester really starts to ramp up and there is a focus on the final projects and papers that are notoriously procrastinated. In the workshop, Emily will cover “the mental reasons why we procrastinate and learn how to put yourself in a space where you can write and generate material. I’m hoping that it really hits with all the other workshops and will be a nice cap to the season.”