Writing Workshop 08.03.12

Here's my experience on this very productive and enlightening workshop, after this experience I understood how I can improve my academic writing.
It was held by Peter Thomas from the Middlesex University Learning Development Unit.
It was very good that few of us participated and form all the 3 modules.
A lot as been said but I'm going to point out the most important learnings, at least the ones I found were most important and of value for me.

First of all it was very interesting to understand how writing should be approached.
Peter explained how at a first stage we generate ideas, research material, find info.
This is the internal and personal factor.
Then secondly we have to organise all these data in order to make it valuable for our piece of writing selecting the ones that relate to one another. Then as a final result we have to present the essay/piece of writing, we need to find a good order to talk about the findings. At this point it helps starting thinking towards the final presentation, the external factor.

Peter explained that these is a "stage" process that not necessarily goes from one onto another, but for an effective writing we can generate, then organise, than go back on generate more, organise again, try a first presentation that may need further organisation before we can develop a final draft. I thought it was a great way of approaching writing not to feel completely lost, this process can be a mess but it can give us a logicality in mind towards it...we can (and should) revisit things before they make sense to us and for the reader.

1.Generate (you/internal)
2.Organise
3.Present (reader/external)

We did an exercise of writing on the question "What is expected in our writings at this level" without interruptions for 5 minutes, we then discussed what we felt while doing it and most of us found it hard to concentrate on the topic. I personally did focus on it but found myself repeating the same message.

We then narrowed down the same piece of writing as Peter asked us to review it finding and underling the main key points we thought were more important.
One at the time we had to explained what these points were and share ideas. I personally had English as a concern for my academic writing, and the importance of explaining technical words in my academic piece of writing.

We then moved onto writing with the same flow and no interruptions about those few key points.
The final stage of this exercise was to write a paragraph regarding the words/sentences we found most important.
Before doing this Thomas introduced us on HOW to write a paragraph. It should be structured this way:
-An initial sentence that summarize and introduces what we are about to talk about.
-Additional information on the main topic
-A conclusion
With this in mind we wrote our paragraphs and in small groups we helped each other out to make it clear and understandable for us, the readers.
We shared our "final products" with the group as that's the stage when, after revisiting few times, our piece goes "public"; we noticed how more detailed and clear our writings were compared to the very original piece.

This exercise was very useful to understand how what we generate in the first place needs to be revisited to achieve a good level of writing that can be understood clearly by everyone.
The whole experience gave us a more relaxed attitude towards writing (and re-writing) as the reader is only going to read the final product and is not going to bother on HOW we got there.

It's ok to be messy!

Topic

Here are few important points that Peter touched and shared with during the day that may be useful when starting writing:

• The order of things is important. How we decide to talk about things. (immagine a funnel shaped piece of writing, we start with general info, then we get down more onto specifics, to finally generate out main topic)

• The main body of the essay should be organized in paragraphs (half an A4 page as a guideline)
• One main point/idea per paragraph
• Contain topic sentences (usually at the beginning of a paragraph)

Hope this helps those who couldn't attend the session, I'm sure you can find valuable information from others who attended so look up everyone's blog and feel free to ask me something that wasn't clear... in the end the important thing is what the readers gets out from a piece of writing!

:)