The Writing Center offers 75-minute group workshops focused on essential academic and professional writing skills. During each workshop, you’ll have the opportunity to discuss and practice strategies in an interactive workshop setting with other motivated students. For Spring 2022, all in-house workshops will run online via Zoom.
2021-22 Online Workshops
- Analyzing Texts: In this workshop, you’ll learn how the best readers analyze texts—by noticing details, observing patterns, and posing questions—and you’ll apply these strategies to your own reading assignments.
- Analyzing Case Studies: In this workshop, you’ll learn the steps of reading and analyzing case studies. You’ll analyze qualitative and quantitative evidence to develop recommendations in response to a dilemma.
- Controlling an Argument with Topic Sentences: In this workshop, you’ll learn how to write strong topic sentences that build on thesis statements, connect paragraphs, and structure arguments.
- Cover Letters: In this workshop, you’ll learn to write tailored cover letters (with polished, professional language) that demonstrate why you’re the best candidate for the job. After closely reading job ads to interpret the needs of an employer, you’ll make strategic choices about what to include.
- Developing Thesis Statements: In this workshop, you’ll learn how to write effective, complex, evidence-based thesis statements in any field.
- Emailing Strategically: In this workshop, you’ll learn how to tailor emails to specific audiences and contexts. You’ll also learn strategies to convey politeness in professional communication.
- Evidence, Analysis, and Claims: In this workshop, you’ll analyze and interpret evidence of all kinds—including graphs, statistics, and quotes from literature—in order to write claims.
- Focusing Research Topics: In this workshop, you’ll learn how to narrow a topic to the point of being “researchable” and to articulate a motivated research question.
- Peer Review: In this workshop, you’ll learn techniques for reading and responding to someone else’s writing. You’ll practice this process by offering feedback to (and receiving feedback from) other students.
- Personal Statements: In this workshop, you’ll learn the difference between “narrative” and “technical” personal statements, read instructions to determine the right genre, and practice supporting the claims in your application materials with evidence.
- Summarizing, Paraphrasing, and Quoting: In this workshop, you’ll learn how to choose between three strategies—summary, paraphrase, and quotation—to support your writing goals. From there, you’ll also learn how to incorporate the words and ideas of others into your essay.
- Understanding Assignments: In this workshop, you’ll decode the stated and unstated expectations of college writing, and you’ll learn how to read assignments in order to plan your drafting process.
- Understanding Plagiarism and Citation: In this workshop, you’ll learn what plagiarism is, why and how it happens, and how to reference others’ work with accuracy, clarity, and confidence.
- Using Sources Strategically: In this workshop, you’ll learn how to find and use sources that meet your paper’s needs: not just those that echo your own argument, but also sources that provide background, examples, counterarguments, and analytical methods.
Signing up for a workshop
You’re welcome to attend as many workshops as you’d like, but you’ll definitely get more from your workshop experience if you have a specific reading, research, or writing project in mind—just as you would for a one-to-one session. During the workshop, you’ll have time to apply what you’ve learned to your own writing and to ask questions of the workshop’s facilitator.
You can browse the workshop schedule and register for a workshop through our Events page. On the Events page, click on the workshop title to find a description and registration link for the workshop. Then, click on the embedded Zoom registration link. When you complete your registration, you will automatically receive the Zoom meeting link via email.
Preparing for a workshop
In order to best serve all students, we ask for your courtesy:
- Arrive on time. Log into the workshop a few minutes before the listed start time. Because the workshop exercises build on one another, we request that you stay for the full 75-minute duration.
- Come prepared to actively engage in the session. These dynamic workshops require you to participate through both group discussion and independent work. Your active participation helps the workshop be successful for everyone.
- Cancel your registration if you can’t make it. If you’re no longer able to attend a workshop you registered for, you can cancel your registration by clicking on the link at the bottom of your Zoom registration confirmation email
