Are you a UCR professor or administrator wanting to provide additional writing support for your graduate students? The Graduate Writing Center offers responsive, by-request seminars and workshops for graduate students. These seminars and workshops are designed to develop students’ understandings of specific writing genres and conventions. Some of these workshops are offered in conjunction with the Graduate Student Resource Center.

Typically, our on-demand work shops are 50 minutes long. However, they can be shortened and/or combined to fit your group’s needs. Please fill out our Service Request Form to request a workshop!

Below are commonly requested workshop topics, along with previous workshop recordings and slides relevant to each topic:

• Academic Reading Strategies

  Succeeding in graduate school requires reading and retaining massive amounts of written material, particularly in the humanities and social sciences. This workshop will provide students with concrete strategies for reading academic work more efficiently and effectively. Save time (and your sanity!) while improving comprehension.

  • Academic Reading Strategies (Recording), Winter 2023
    • Learn concrete strategies for reading academic work more efficiently and effectively.
• English Grammar Refresher for Graduate Students

  This workshop will cover the basic grammatical concepts of the English language, including sentence structure, pronoun usage, prepositions, article usage, and tips for expanding a discipline-specific vocabulary. For native and non-native English speakers alike, this workshop is an ideal opportunity to ask questions and gain skills.

  • English Grammar Refresher: Punctuations for Clarity (Recording | Slides), Spring 2025
    • This workshop will provide a refresher on commonly used punctuations that often change the meaning of your writing or make your writing unclear.
  • English Grammar Refresher (Recording), Fall 2024
    • This workshop to revisit some of the core aspects of English grammar that will help you begin your writing projects for the quarter.
• Fellowship Writing Strategies

  Looking to obtain funding for your research? This workshop will cover strategies for interpreting application requirements, writing compelling statements and project descriptions, and requesting letters of recommendation.

  • Grant Writing for STEM (Recording | Slides), Spring 2024
    • This workshop will offer an overview of the basics for grant writing specifically tailored to STEM fields. 
  • Humanities and Arts Grant Writing (Recording), Winter 2024
    • This workshop offers an overview for applying for humanities grants. Attendees will learn about funding types, where to find funding, and the basic components of the application. 
  • Pitching in the Arts (Recording), Winter 2024
    • This workshop discusses the basic components for pitching your arts project in concise, simple, and engaging terms. 
  • Developing a Methodology Statement for Grants and Fellowships (Recording), Winter 2025
    • This workshop will focus on the methodology statement aspect of humanities research. We will develop the statements by differentiating between methods and methodologies, and the expectations of grant committees for this document.
• Academic Integrity

  This program offers a primer on how to properly cite sources without plagiarizing. Furthermore, students will review real-world examples on how to apply UCR’s policies and procedures regarding academic integrity and how to avoid plagiarism, cheating, unauthorized collaboration, facilitating academic dishonesty, interference or sabotage, fabrication, and retaliation.

• Writing a Research Proposal

  We can offer discipline-specific workshops to help students from individual departments learn how to approach writing a research proposal. This workshop can be tailored to the particular needs of proposals submitted by your department’s students.

• Writing a Successful Abstract

  Often geared toward STEM students, this workshop provides a detailed overview of the necessary components for a successful abstract. This workshop can be tailored for students from any discipline where abstracts are a standard academic genre.

  • Writing a Successful Abstract (Recording), Spring 2024
    • This workshop will discuss the basics of abstract writing, why writing successful abstracts is important, and offer tools to help students draft their own abstracts.  
  • Writing a Successful Abstract Across Disciplines (Recording | Slides), Winter 2025
    • This workshop will explain what an abstract is, what makes a good abstract, and writing guidelines across various disciplines in humanities, social sciences, and STEM.
• Preparing Academic Job Application Materials

  The GWC has workshops and support materials geared towards writing academic cover letters, CVs, teaching statements, diversity statements, and research statements. A 50-minute version of this workshop can typically cover two of these genres, e.g., cover letters and CVs or cover letters and teaching statements.

  • Writing Professional Documents for Teaching Jobs (Recording), Spring 2025
    • This workshop will cover how to approach the writing process when applying for teaching positions. In this market, we need to learn how to both “hit the mark,” and tailor our academic interest accordingly.
  • CV and Resume Building (Recording | Slides | Handouts)
    • This workshop covers how to create, organize, and polish your CV/Resume. This workshop will address questions of what to include in a CV/Resume, how to effectively organize this information, and how to put your best foot forward in your CV/Resume.
  • Alt-Ac Job Search (Slides), Winter 2024
    • This workshop discusses specific elements of the alt-ac job search. Attendees will learn strategies for reframing research and teaching experiences into focused skill sets.
• Writing an Academic Argument

  This program is generally geared towards incoming and early-career students in the humanities and social sciences. This program reviews how to write an effective academic argument, including surveying the literature, identifying relevant debates, and rhetorical strategies to state your intervention.

  • Graduate-Level Argumentation (Recording), Winter 2024
    • This workshop reviews the main components for graduate-level argumentation. Topics that will be discussed include: surveying the literature and locating a debate; narrowing your topic; rhetorical strategies; organization; using sources effectively; and revision and editing.
• Communicating with a General Audience or How to Not Talk Like a Scientist

  This workshop is designed to help STEM students communicate their work to a broader audience. By learning to distill their academic research into presentations and publications that present information in an organized, intuitive, and accessible way. This skill enables students to expand their professional network, apply for grants and fellowships that are not discipline-specific, and communicate the details of their academic work to future employers, mentors, and colleagues.

  • How to Write Concisely (Recording), Winter 2025
    • This workshop will cover strategies and tips for writing concisely and effectively. For this workshop, we will discuss what concise writing is, why it's beneficial, and how you can implement these strategies in your own writing.
  • Summarizing Strategies for Academic Writing (Recording), Winter 2025
    • This workshop will review writing strategies that incoming and current graduate students can begin to use to summarize broad and specific academic content for their present work and long term research, keeping deadlines and time constraints in view.
  • Writing Effectively In Grad School (Recording), Fall 2024
    • This workshop will present on how to write effectively during graduate school and will suggest how students should refocus their academic writing to gain the maximum value and benefit in their work.
• Publishing Your Journal Article in One Quarter

  Want to boost your students’ publication success? Based on Wendy Belcher’s popular book, Writing Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks, this series of workshops (options for between 4 and 7 meetings) reviews abstracts, literature reviews, structure, evidence, revising and submission. The group will set and meet goals for each meeting, culminating in the preparation of an article for publication by the end of the series.

  • Completing your First Year Preparation for Writing, Researching, and Publishing (Recording), Fall 2024
    • This workshop offers a space to address the expectations of humanities and social sciences programs and how we can prepare for the increased reading loads and writing for current and future projects.
  • Manuscript Introductions and Discussions (Slides), Fall 2024
    • Are you not sure how to start your manuscript? Having trouble connecting your work to broader topics? Attend this workshop to learn the basics of writing manuscript introductions and discussions.
  • Editing Strategies (Recording), Fall 2024
    • This workshop will cover both editing and proofreading strategies to review, improve, and enhance the style, clarity, basic structure, and overall presentation of your essay and more.

The following workshops are offered in conjunction with the Graduate Student Resource Center:

• Building Your Mentoring Network

  Graduate students have multiple needs including intellectual community, emotional support, and professional development. This workshop provides an overview of how to identify mentors in each of these areas and how to build an effective mentoring network.

• Graduate School 101: Tips for Success

  This program offers students an overview of expectations of professional behavior in graduate school and academia. Workshop learning outcomes include: grad school norms, how to manage professional relationships, the do’s and don’t’s for succeeding in grad school, and identifying resources available to UCR graduate students.