Build a Robust Writing Habit (a special series with Dr. Emily Troscianko)

Writing is a tricky business. In the academic context, it’s about getting qualifications, it’s about demonstrating expertise and career progression, it’s maybe about expressing things we care about, and it’s how we spend a good chunk of our working week (or how we probably ought to, or want to). Writing gets bound up with all kinds of practical, emotional, and existential questions, and sometimes the weight of all these expectations feels too much.

This half-day event is a chance for you to lighten the burden. We’ll begin by paying attention. We’ll find out what your attitudes to and experiences of writing right now actually are, and then do some simple classification: Are these real problems, pseudo-problems, or positives? Then we’ll each design our own “behavioural experiment” to attempt to solve the problem or pseudo-problem we’d most like to be rid of. In the rest of the afternoon, we’ll use two timed writing sessions with planning and review—plus a break with food, drink, and physical movement—to start conducting the experiment we’ve designed, and observing and learning from the effects. We’ll wrap up with some brainstorming of ideas for protecting and enhancing your positives. You’ll come away with confidence in your capacity to adopt a spirit of curious experimentation with the macro and micro structures of your writing habits—a meta-attitude that reliably helps tomorrow feel and work incrementally better than yesterday.

This workshop is part of larger series being offered by Dr. Emily Troscianko, a visiting scholar with the English department at UCSB this year, as well as a coach, writer, researcher, and creator of Oxford University’s first writing program. While the series is intended to work as a sequence, you can also sign up for individual events as standalone sessions. They are open to all graduate students, and space is limited to 20 participants per session. Bring a writing project-in-progress that you can work on during our timed sessions and be prepared to be without your phone, social media, and email for the duration, including the breaks. A communal phone tin will be provided!
 
These events are sponsored by UCSB’s Graduate Division in collaboration with the Office of Research and the Literature and Mind Center’s Trauma-Informed Pedagogy project. They will contribute to campus-wide learning about how to help the classroom be more conducive to learning and thinking. As such, they will involve information-gathering from event participants after signing up for an event, as well as at the start and end of the event. You can read more about the project here: https://forms.gle/QBHSLMgpyo9RTW8B9. If you decide to register for one or more events, you will be asked to read the information carefully before deciding whether to take part. Please contact Emily at emilytroscianko@ucsb.edu if you have any questions.

This event offers a full session of structure, guidance, and company for your academic writing, with a focus on how to start a project effectively, efficiently, and enjoyably. In the 3.5 hours, we’ll try out a range of tactics from a tailored list of 10 ways to stop procrastinating, and you’ll assess which work best for you and make plans for incorporating them into your everyday writing life. Alongside these explorations of writing habit strategy, the afternoon includes mental and physical preparation for writing, practice in goal-setting and review, two timed writing sessions, and a midway break with refreshments and stretching.

Please bring with you a project to work on that is in some sense new, or that you’ve been putting off or procrastinating with. You’ll be given a small pre-event task to help you pay attention to how reading and research flow into being ready to write.

This workshop is part of larger series being offered by Dr. Emily Troscianko, a visiting scholar with the English department at UCSB this year, as well as a coach, writer, researcher, and creator of Oxford University’s first writing program. While the series is intended to work as a sequence, you can also sign up for individual events as standalone sessions. They are open to all graduate students, and space is limited to 20 participants per session. Bring a writing project-in-progress that you can work on during our timed sessions and be prepared to be without your phone, social media, and email for the duration, including the breaks. A communal phone tin will be provided!
 
These events are sponsored by UCSB’s Graduate Division in collaboration with the Office of Research and the Literature and Mind Center’s Trauma-Informed Pedagogy project. They will contribute to campus-wide learning about how to help the classroom be more conducive to learning and thinking. As such, they will involve information-gathering from event participants after signing up for an event, as well as at the start and end of the event. You can read more about the project here: https://forms.gle/QBHSLMgpyo9RTW8B9. If you decide to register for one or more events, you will be asked to read the information carefully before deciding whether to take part. Please contact Emily at emilytroscianko@ucsb.edu if you have any questions.

Academic life often feels like it’s perfectly designed to give us too much to do and too little time and energy to do it. Knowing how to make efficient, focused use of small pockets of time is crucial to managing to keep prioritizing important over urgent and carving out chances to really think, create, and problem-solve—as well as restore ourselves. Writing in particular is essential to academic career progression and a crucial transferable skill for many professional sectors, as well as a powerful tool for developing and communicating complex ideas. It is also a great example of an activity that falls away in times of stress or busyness, because it’s often cognitively and emotionally demanding as well as having long lead times and few short-term extrinsic rewards.

This masterclass offers you an intensive array of ways to get yourself in gear and in the zone for writing (and anything else demanding you need to be doing): varied (but all short!) lengths of writing and admin sessions, guided goal-setting strategies, study prep exercises, quick stretching and breathing sequences, simple options for helping ourselves truly unwind or clear our minds. Via a range of routes, we’ll learn, or remind ourselves, that even for big difficult projects and assignments, we don’t in fact need the 3 uninterrupted library hours that never come. Whether for dissertation- writing or, for to-do list clearing, or for taking meaningful time for ourselves and our personal priorities—we can work wonders with the odd 20 minutes sandwiched between other things.

If you want to get as much writing done as possible on this particular day, this is not the event for you. You will get some writing done, but more importantly, you will transform how you write for the rest of the quarter and beyond.

This workshop is part of larger series being offered by Dr. Emily Troscianko, a visiting scholar with the English department at UCSB this year, as well as a coach, writer, researcher, and creator of Oxford University’s first writing program. While the series is intended to work as a sequence, you can also sign up for individual events as standalone sessions. They are open to all graduate students, and space is limited to 20 participants per session. Bring a writing project-in-progress that you can work on during our timed sessions and be prepared to be without your phone, social media, and email for the duration, including the breaks. A communal phone tin will be provided!
 
These events are sponsored by UCSB’s Graduate Division in collaboration with the Office of Research and the Literature and Mind Center’s Trauma-Informed Pedagogy project. They will contribute to campus-wide learning about how to help the classroom be more conducive to learning and thinking. As such, they will involve information-gathering from event participants after signing up for an event, as well as at the start and end of the event. You can read more about the project here: https://forms.gle/QBHSLMgpyo9RTW8B9. If you decide to register for one or more events, you will be asked to read the information carefully before deciding whether to take part. Please contact Emily at emilytroscianko@ucsb.edu if you have any questions.