Aims

To provide dedicated writing time and develop productive writing practices and discussions around writing-in-progress.

Audience

PhD students and active researchers.

 Format

This structured retreat uses the ‘typing pool’ model. Writers are all in the same room, writing in scheduled time slots, using goal-setting, peer monitoring and warm up activities to progress writing projects. Because everyone is writing in the same room, there can be brief discussions at the start and end of the day (of 10 or 15 minutes), to set goals and take stock, but almost all of this retreat time will be writing time.

Preparing for retreat

Choose a writing project to work on – e.g. journal article, thesis chapter or grant proposal. Do the necessary reading and research on journal/publisher/funder and on the topic before the retreat and arrive ready to write. The Writing for Publication workshop on the day before this retreat will introduce strategies that will help participants make best use of this retreat, but it is not a pre-requisite.

The facilitator

Rowena Murray will facilitate this retreat and will support participants who are new to this approach. She will suggest strategies for making this approach work and will be working on a writing project at this retreat.

For information on structured writing retreats

See Murray and Newton (2009) in the journal Higher Education Research and Development and Murray and Moore’s (2006) Handbook of Academic Writing (Maidenhead: Open University Press-McGraw-Hill).