Writing Time | Quiet space for writing at iiiUC

Target Public: PhD students at iiiUC

Face-to-face event

Date: 14th December 2022, 9:30am to 5pm

Number of vacancies: 10 students

Place: Institute of Interdisciplinary Research | Casa Costa Alemão, R. Dom Francisco de Lemos, 3030-789 Coimbra.

Registration closed

Brief Description

The IIIUC intends to provide its doctoral students with a regular calm and silent space for writing. As such, it will hold a pilot session of this moment dedicated to writing on 14 December for the doctoral students of its Doctoral Programmes.

On this day the doctoral students will be invited to write together in a contained and peer-supportive environment. Following the methodology of structured writing retreats, the aim is to increase motivation for writing, to help deal with the pressure to publish, and to decrease the social isolation that characterises the doctoral journey. The session will be unaccompanied, and it is up to each participant to manage their own writing time.

To guide the writing day, the doctoral students should:

  • make a defined writing project on which they intend to work that day (e.g. X paragraphs of the thesis introduction, a methodological section, a table, a review of comments from the supervisor in a chapter, etc.);
  • sketch a basic plan (an end goal/summary) for the writing sessions; if you are not sure what you want to achieve, spend about 20-30 minutes free-writing or mind-mapping;
  • do the relevant readings and notes needed for the writing before the writing day;
  • bring the necessary material already downloaded on the computer to avoid unnecessary visits to the Internet; and,
  • bring healthy snacks for breaks during the day.

Answer in full sentences:

  • What is my concrete goal for the session?
  • What do I plan for each of the writing sessions?
  • What is the purpose of the section I’m writing (or revising) today?

Bibliographie

Uta Papen & Virginie Thériault (2017): Writing retreats as a milestone in the development of PhD students’ sense of self as academic writers, Studies in Continuing Education. DOI: 10.1080/0158037X.2017.1396973