The PPLS Writing Centre holds workshops throughout the year. Pre-honours students have a series in autumn to start things off right, while we help Honours and PGT students closer to their dissertation due dates (in spring and summer, respectively). These are the target audiences, but anyone from any level in PPLS is welcome to attend any event. Every workshop we produce uses examples of real student writing to illustrate what works and what doesn’t (by the way, if you’d like to let us use anonymised extracts from your own writing to create future workshops and other guidance material, please fill out this form to give us permission to do so).
Our Honours workshops are taught by PhD tutors who have worked for the PPLS Writing Centre for 3 years or more. They’ve seen dozens of students (in some cases, over a hundred) about writing assignments, and they’ve also spent long hours marking student work as part of their regular tutoring duties. This gives them particular insight into where students in their subject areas go wrong. That’s why I’ve asked them to develop workshops to help larger audiences avoid those pitfalls.
Over the last two months, Fang Yang (psychology) delivered a series of Honours workshops on how to write quantitative reports. These were mostly for psychology students, though some linguistics students also have to produce this sort of writing (which is why examples were drawn from both psychology and sociolinguistics). The six 2-hour sessions were fully booked out, and many students ended up on waiting lists. Due to this high demand, we’ve arranged for one extra set of sessions to be held in early April. We know that we’re already past the due date for the psychology dissertations, but many people have written us to say that they are still interested in attending. If you’d like to book, please do so as soon as possible here.
In philosophy, Hadeel Naeem and Rie Iizuka will be delivering two workshop series on argumentation. Students who attend will learn how to properly develop arguments and account for both real and hypothetical objections. These will be held during the second week of April, but we want to make sure that we pick the right dates. In order to help us do this, please vote here for times that work for you.
Again, these workshops have been developed with Honours students in mind, but you’re more than welcome to attend if you’re a Pre-honours student who wants to take a look at what’s coming up or a PGT student who wants to start thinking about the dissertation now.