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.

Below are commonly requested workshop topics:

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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 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.

• 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.

• Publishing Your Journal Article in One Quarter –Workshop Series

  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.

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.