Past Workshops
Informal Academic Communication (for non-native speakers of English)
Mondays, 4:00 p.m. – 5:30 p.m., McLennan Physical Laboratories, 255 Huron Street, Room 134
Accessibility: Main entrance: powered entrance at grade.The entrance is only visible from the street looking through the parkette from St. George Street.
All workshops in this series are taught by Clare Nippard.
May 6: Email Etiquette
A great number of important academic interactions take place over email. Are you sometimes unsure how to express yourself in these conversations? Using a case-study approach, this workshop will address when to use email, what to include in an email, how to open and close an email, and how to achieve the right level of formality.
May 13: Using Small Talk for Networking
Meeting new colleagues, interacting with peers, attending conferences, interviewing for a job; in all of these contexts, small talk helps us establish professional connections. However, using small talk effectively is challenging: sometimes we are not sure how to initiate a conversation, what to talk about, or how much to say. This workshop will focus on practical strategies to build confidence and skill in small talk for networking.
Writing in Graduate School
Tuesdays, 4:00 p.m. – 5:30 p.m., Bahen Centre Information Tech, 40 St. George Street, Room 1200
Accessibility: Main entrance: powered door approached by ramp and stair. The entrance faces west and is clearly visible from St. George Street.
All workshops in this series are taught by Dr. Trevor Cook.
May 7: Writing Correctly (without Grammarly or Microsoft Word)
Canadian students used to learn the rules of English by rote. That is seldom the case anymore. Beginning in the 1980s, grade-school teachers began privileging comprehension over correctness, meaning that you might have made it all the way to graduate school without a firm grasp of the basics of English grammar. You are not alone! This workshop will provide a refresher for both native and fluent non-native speakers of English, with special emphasis on how practically to detect and correct the most common errors in graduate student writing, without an editor, word processor, or third-party program.
May 14: Improving Flow in Academic Writing: Cohesion and Coherence
Flow is an essential quality of good academic writing; it’s important that our ideas move seamlessly from one to another. But flow isn’t a particularly helpful metaphor, especially when we are told that it is missing from our writing. How does one improve something as slippery as ‘flow’? This workshop will discuss two specific types of flow: cohesion, the movement between sentences; and coherence, the connections between sections of a document. Participants will be introduced to concrete steps they can take to objectively evaluate and correct both in their own writing.