Day in Huddersfield Yesterday at the PG Writing Workshop

Hi there,

So yesterday I made the trip to Huddersfield to go to the PG Writing Skills Workshop that was organised by MARS organisation. The AHRC had given funding to run the workshops, but unfortunately that was the last one as the scheme was funded for two years only. Looks like I've missed the boat!!

Anyway, it was really useful to meet fellow researchers and the sessions were quite inspiring. In the morning there were two sessions about how to write. I often feel that I am not present within my writing and that my tone is too serious and the language is strict, but I need to remember that as I am "in my writing" as it's coming from me (yes, obvious I know). Not sure exactly what I can do about the tone or language, I suppose this will improve when I read more articles.

The afternoon was spent looking at case studies to identify how academic writing can be improved. One important point that was made during the session was to not get caught up with making small typographical/formatting changes during your writing. Leave this to the end! Also, we all should be more confident when presenting our arguments and findings. Often researchers put caveats on their work which can make our work more difficult to be accepted or justified.

We also had a session on publishing PhDs, obviously I am a long way off this yet, but one thing that I didn't know about was EThOS (Electronic Thesis Online Service). Apart from students at Oxford and Cambridge, eventually everyone's thesis will be digitised and put onto this system so that anyone can read a thesis for free. Check out http://ethos.bl.uk/Home.do;jsessionid=695E73D9C61D0770348E4D26901ADF2D for more information about EThOS.

I could go on for ages about the workshop yesterday, but I won't.

Bye for now,

Steph