What others say
This was a great program and I really felt like I grew as a writer over the past 6 sessions. Thank you so very much for creating this workshop and for allowing us to connect with others across the globe. The writing exercises and habits have been very helpful and I am loving my morning pages routine.
– Jennifer, Texas, USA
Your course gave me good ideas how to improve active collaboration in online meetings and online teaching. Especially the mix between input and breakout sessions is very valuable, because participants are engaged and not just consume like TV.
– N., Germany
Really loved it and truly appreciate the work that you put into this!
- C., Wisconsin, USA
Thank you so much! This has been life-changing. I gained so many insights and tips that are already helping improve my writing.
– S., Baltimore, USA
Christina - really enjoyed the course. I found it particularly helpful to share experiences - but also the practical writing tasks were really helpful. I will use them in the future for sure. Thank you!
– L., UK
It was a great course for developing writing habits. Great tips and interesting exercises that I did not hear about before. Thank you very much Christina for sharing and taking care!
- G., Sweden
I would like to thank you very much for holding this series of workshops. I found them utterly useful and definitely learned lots of things that are beneficial for my writing. Breakout sessions have been really fun moments and I was glad to have the opportunity to meet such great people with interesting and different backgrounds! Best course in my phd career so far!!
– A., Italy
It was great, especially your attitude how to empower us as excellent writers. It was really nice and helpful to focus me on keep writing. The exercises gave me a better feeling of how to prioritize my writing. It was really helpful and a wonderful experience! Thank you!
- M., Germany
I really enjoy the workshop! I wish it wasn’t going by so fast and I had more time to try the things out and put them into practice in between the sessions. Like a good book, I am afraid to continue, because I don’t want it to end.
–Z., Germany
The writing project went well. I received a grant of the proposal I worked on while attending the workshop last year and now working on the project.
- K., Ontario, Canada
It has been great to do this workshop with you as a woman with a family because you really have not shied away from sharing your own personal struggles with time and managing different aspects of life. And how that is something that we all struggle with and make it a part of our daily life and how we get on with our scholarly work. I appreciate that you brought that into focus.
You motivate us to keep going, the way we want to go in order to achieve our ambitions and goals. The workshop was very relatable, practical and pragmatic.
– M., United Arab Emirates
Thank you soooo much! The course has been really interesting and has helped me to find “strategies” to overcome my main difficulties when writing.
Overall, I think that for PhD students this is a must-do workshop! And for the rest of us, I think it is really helpful in establishing a writing habit, which is probably the most difficult task, with teaching, exams, paperwork, faculty meetings, etc.,
– I. Italy
I feel like I am more much productive now and I still keep in touch with one colleague from your workshop - we meet once a month online to practice the principles we learned in your course.
- S., France
Detailed reviews of my workshops by students
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Thank you for the great workshop! This process helped me dispel some myths about publication writing and reading and taught me how to approach both tasks more effectively.
It was enlightening for me to understand the writing activity as a multidimensional effort comprising varied tasks - writing, revising, self-criticism, editing, etc. It was great to see that trying to accomplish them all at once is counterproductive, and this workshop helped me develop strategies to approach them individually.
Of all strategies that we learned, I enjoyed using the freewriting technique to overcome feelings of frustration or mental blockages when initiating a complex writing task.
Even for the more mundane tasks, like writing a longer email, I have now started using variations of this technique to get the main message down fast, which has saved me time.
Also, the SQR approach to literature review has helped me immensely with preparing for my comprehensive exam -which is less than 2 months away : )
It helped me to engage with the text with a more active and focused mindset. As a Ph.D. student, it was comforting to see that I am not alone when it comes to writing productivity and the challenges associated with it and that even the more seasoned colleagues in the class have also struggled with similar issues: procrastination, setbacks, and motivational ups and downs.
You did a fabulous job with leading this workshop and achieving, in my opinion, a good balance of lecture and practice with a fun and pleasant vibe. I will certainly recommend this to others.
Having this platform to hone my writing talents through habit and practice was incredible.Thank you so much. Please take care and stay safe.
– I., Michigan, USA
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I just wanted to send a note saying thank you so much for this wonderful workshop. I really enjoyed the weekly interactions with everyone and thought we had a great group even in spite of the virtual format.
For me, if there is ever a time where I feel like my research pipeline is getting bottlenecked, it is nearly always during the writing stages. The phrase "don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good" definitely applies to me with respect to academic writing.
So when I saw the call for this workshop on the ACR listserv, I was excited to take it with the goal of obtaining a few skills/tools to use to be more efficient.
While there were a lot of useful pieces I picked up throughout the workshop, I think the two I am mostly likely to consistently use are the freewriting exercise and the SQR method for lit reviews.
I think the freewriting exercise will be quite useful for either generating a first pass outline for a front end or GD or for taking an initial crack at filling out the content of a particular paragraph. Again, I have a tendency to try and write the perfect first draft, and while I tend to be happy with what I eventually wind up with, I know that there are ways that I can get there faster.
Then with the SQR method, I have known for a long time I need to be more discerning and efficient with my lit reviews. This will be a great tool to use for prioritizing what papers I actually need to read and which I just want to read.
This method alone made the workshop worth it to me. In any event, I just wanted to share my experiences with the workshop and let you know I really enjoyed it.
I will be sure to pass this workshop along to my colleagues and doc students who feel like they could benefit from developing their writing skills further.
- T., Cincinatti, USA
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(Review in German)
Vielen Dank für diesen tollen ersten Workshop im Rahmen des Academic writing-Kurses! Ich muss sagen, das war der beste online Workshop, an dem ich bisher teilgenommen habe. (Und das waren aufgrund von Corona schon einige in diesem Jahr...)
Der Kurs hat genau dir richtige Mischung aus Vortrag/Input und Interaktivität. Die Übungen sind nicht zu lang oder zu aufwendig, sie sind leicht umzusetzen und machen Spaß.
Der Austausch mit den anderen Teilnehmern ist auch super. Eine wirklich interessante und sympathische Mischung an Teilnehmern. Es fühlt sich sogar fast an, als wäre man in einem offline Workshop und würde mit den anderen in einem Raum sitzen. Die Atmosphäre ist sehr entspannt und freundlich.
Obwohl das heute erst der erste Workshop von sechs war, habe ich das Gefühl, dass sich die Teilnahme für mich bereits gelohnt hat. Insbesondere die praktischen Tipps und Übungen empfinde ich als sehr hilfreich, und das nicht nur für mein „berufliches“ Schreiben.
- F., Italien