Project “Organizing Writers’ Retreat”

The HSE Academic Writing Center (AWC) launches a new project for ESL instructors – Organizing the Writer’s Retreat. We invite the members of the National Consortium of Writing Centers and academic writing instructors to take part in an online series of professional development workshops.

In the workshops, we will discuss the ideas and values behind writing retreats, learn to read beyond sentence-level issues to identify higher-order, rhetorical concerns in a text, learn to understand what you as a writing instructor offer to writers even when you are completely unfamiliar with their disciplines and topics. Participants will also work with some sample texts to plan how they would help writers.

The objectives of the project are to:

• raise participants’ awareness of the writing retreat philosophy

• provide tips for efficient organization of the event, and

• give practice of manuscript reviewing and feedback giving.

Sessions:

November 11 - “Philosophy of Writers Retreats”

November 18 - “Reading Beyond Error”

November 23 - “Consulting Outside Your Comfort Zone”

December 1 - “Responding to Reviewers”

The instructors are Talinn Phillips, Ph.D., Associate Professor and Director of the Graduate Writing & Research Center at the College of Arts and Sciences, Ohio University (USA), and Svetlana Suchkova, Ph.D., AWC HSE director, author of textbooks in academic writing.

The participation is free. Participants will be awarded the AWC certificate provided they have attended all the sessions.

The project was successfully completed.

This is what the participants say:

The general atmosphere of professional guidelines provided by Talinn Phillips combined with the manner of presenting in-depth data in a clear and logical manner deserves the highest possible merit.

The course was extremely useful and immensely insightful.

It was of an enormous benefit, and this benefit is sure to be long-term as well. I now have a much better understanding of the rationale behind my own writing course for MA students. Thank you so much!