How-to-guide on Writing Tools
This narrated PowerPoint presentation discusses the challenge many postgraduate students face: fitting enough time into every week for reading and writing towards a finished thesis. The resource offers three ‘tools’: the Pomodoro Technique, Freewriting, and Shut-Up-and-Write sessions, as tools or strategies postgraduate students can use to make the most of their writing and reading time, and to ensure that they can fit time in for these tasks every week. Additional reading and resources for further consideration accompany the video. It should be watched along with ‘Just write’, also on this website. These tools can also be used with reading and research journals, which you can look up under ‘Starting a PG journey’.
Explore these additional resources
Useful websites:
Questions for users:
- For supervisors/PG support staff: could you use one or more of these tools in supervision or writing support sessions? How could a workshop or supervision meeting include freewriting, for example, on a topic that students would benefit from brainstorming on? Could you encourage students to use these tools, and if so, how would you see them working for your students?
- For students: Arrange your own writing group meetings. Think of 2 or 3 people in your department or programme that you could spend an hour or two with each week, writing. Set up a day and time for a Shut-Up-and-Write session, and a place to meet. Debrief with one another afterwards, and see if the session helped, and if it did, arrange a further meeting. Start small, and build from there, as this is more manageable in the long run.
Who might find this useful?
This material is primarily for postgraduate students, although the tools could be used in workshops with students run by postgraduate and/or writing support practitioners, to assist with time management within workshops, or model the use of the tools.