WRITING CLASS FOR BSI STUDENTS

Read Carefully The Text and Write An Outline and An Essay

1.
• Decide whether or not you want to fit writing into your life.
• Assess how important writing is to you.
• Integrating writing in your life may mean changing your writing
behaviours.
• Behaviour change can be managed as a process.
• Start by articulating your beliefs and values, in relation to academic writing.
• New knowledge about writing is unlikely to produce behaviour change.
• Document your actual writing practices in some form, e.g. an email trail.
• Integrate your writing by making connections between your writings.
• Clarify the distinction between your writing goals, plans and actions.

2.
Don’t take on too much – this is easier said than done.
• Align your definition of ‘too much’ with others’. Talk to your head of
department.
• If you only get a ‘buzz’ from teaching, review your definition of ‘research’.
• Establish what value research has for you, the university, your profession.
• Find or create synergies between your teaching and research (see Chapter 3).
• Start a teaching portfolio and write about your teaching in any form.
• If you already have a teaching portfolio, consider broadening the contents.
• Identify aspects of teaching and learning that you’d like to know more
about.
• Write about your practice – make links with the literature.
• Write a scholarly paper about your teaching and submit it to a journal.
3.
• Define the characteristics of writing in your discipline.
• Analyse recent issues of journals in your discipline.
• Focus on and compare specific points in several papers.
• Work out how you can adapt your writing for different journals.
• Decide how you want to position yourself in your discipline.
• Consider your options for ‘voicing’ this position in your writing.

4.
• See yourself as part of a conversation and decide to join the dialogue.
• Identify how you can engage with current issues or unanswered questions
in a way that might catalyse a reaction.
• Encourage your students to read written work of yours and that of other
authors.
• Respond positively to requests to talk about your work.
• Explore your motivation (see also chapter 9).
• Track the times in your writing when you’re most likely to feel engaged and
focused.
• Avoid unstructured proliferation of ideas – set up your ideas file and keep
them relatively organized.
• Generate targets and outlines that will help to avoid unstructured, uncaptured
garrulous approaches to writing.
• Find what really interests you, something you care about or an angle about
which you can feel passionate.
• Check the extracts of your writing that you feel most proud of, and try to
identify the features of the context in which you wrote it.
• Keep a writing diary that allows you to track the rhythms of your writing.
• Talk to trusted others about your writing and capture important or striking
aspects of that conversation.
• Protect time for advancing your writing – don’t listen to voices that say you
don’t know enough – maybe this is true, but you won’t always know where
the gaps are until you have generated some skeletal outline of where it is
you want to go.

5.
• Plan to take regular breaks from your writing, especially at times when you
have made a lot of active or intense progress.
• Be vigilant for signs that you may need to start stepping back from your
work. These signs might include: slowing down of your writing
momentum, a lack of structure, a sense of repetitiveness, uncertainty or
fatigue.
• Practise switching off. Stop thinking about your writing. Try to leave it
behind and not brood or mull over it during these switch-off times.
• Get used to showing your work to other people. If you find this difficult,
start with small pieces of your writing, and choose to show it to someone
you really trust to be sensitive but also honest about their reactions.
• Try to decide on what kind of feedback will be most likely to help you make
progress on your work, and then ask for it.
• Analyse positive feedback on your writing as assiduously as you analyse
negative feedback.
• In assimilating feedback, take notes and plan the ways in which you are
going to start re-engaging

6.
• A pragmatic way of allocating a dedicated block of time to academic writing.
• An event that provides intensive, holistic, symbolic and practical support
for all aspects of the writing process.
• An event that recognizes the physical, psychological, academic and
collegiate needs of academic writers.
• An event characterized by hard work in the context of a healthy, stress-free,
enjoyable week.
• An event that enhances output.
• An event that aims to give rise to more productive writing habits in the
longer term.
• An event that encourages creative engagement in academic writing tasks.