Writing Workshop

PSY 3520 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

The Writing Workshop is the ultimate professional development course. It was developed by Barbara Sarnecka at UC Irvine, and involves working through her witty, moving, and extremely effective book.  Basically, if one cannot write effectively, and publish, one cannot succeed in academia. As Sarnecka puts in in the opening paragraph of the book, "Research is writing.  No one gets a fellowship, a PhD, a postdoc, a job, a grant, or a promotion except by writing, which means that professional researchers are by definition professional writers." Sarnecka has run writing workshops as graduate classes with great success for several years now and the book distills what she has found to work.  She documents increased productivity and happiness among the workshop participants.  Classes will each involve some time doing actual writing, in parallel, but all at once, a feedback forum where at least once a semester a participant gets feedback on a page or two of writing, and in class exercises and discussion about the mechanics of writing, managing time, dealing with anxiety and rejections, among many other topics.

What's required:  Participation in one 2 hour 45 minute seminar meeting a week which will be a workshop on academic writing.  There will be a small amount of reading in advance of each class, mainly from Barbara Sarnecka's book, The Writing Workshop:  Write More, Write Better, Be Happier in Academia, sometimes supplemented by readings from other books, such as Pinker's The Sense of Style.

Course Notes

Open to graduate students and postdocs in Psychology.