CCIG Writers Group

CCIG hosted an excellent writing workshop led by Rowena Murray on 16 June 2009. The audience comprised CCIG early career researchers and PhD students. The purpose was to help us write more efficiently – whatever our personal writing tasks.

What a great set of strategies Rowena provided: warm up exercises, writing to prompts, freewheeling generative writing, preparing abstracts, outlining papers, and more.

Some of us there might confess we were a little reluctant to be attending yet another personal development day – it can be difficult setting aside a whole day in a busy schedule and of course we have to choose carefully what we spend our time on. But, for me, and I think for others there, it was quite possibly the best training day attended in a long time. I came away feeling inspired, re-motivated and importantly, more confident about achieving my writing targets.

So, using the workshop as our stimulus, we have now set up a writing group, again hosted by CCIG, but open to all. We had our first meeting concurrent with CCIG Forum 6 on 7th July. We are still working out exactly how the writing group will proceed, but it was such a treat to see the enthusiasm generated by Rowena’s training session carrying over to the formation of the new writing support network. Crucially, the essence of our writing group is that we get on and do some writing – and we have a range of strategies to make that happen. So, if you would like some prompts to re-think your writing strategies – whatever it is you want to be writing – you are very welcome to join us.

Our next meeting will be 19th August 2009, 2.00 – 3.30 p.m. in room 003 Gardiner 1, but we are very flexible about times and dates. Please come along if you would like to hear more. For further details contact Jean McAvoy: J.M.McAvoy@open.ac.uk