Writing at university can be demanding – meeting deadlines, adhering to regulations, mastering disciplinary expectations. This is compounded by rapidly evolving digital and AI technologies that promise to solve your problems while adding new challenges. This intensive academic workshop and retreat offers you a structured and supportive environment to progress your own texts. It also equips you with strategies to critically integrate AI tools in ways that enhance your authorial agency by prioritising mind over machine.
The workshop demystifies writing by breaking the process down into its different aspects and distributing them across manageable phases. It creates a workflow that helps you grow your text, from conception through revision to submission. It guides you in developing a clear and convincing style of your own, from choosing appropriate words to leading readers through the overall narrative or argument. And it allows you to decide how much you want to integrate various digital technologies into your writing in a competent and responsible manner.
The intensive workshop is particularly suited to bachelor and master students across all faculties who want to develop transferable general academic writing competences. Its immersive three-day format helps you make significant progress on your writing project, whether you are planning a paper or already working on a text to submit to a lecturer, supervisor, or publisher.
The workshop and writing retreat follows the iterative write-review-revise cycle to nurture productive writing strategies and improve the quality of your output. It combines the following components to help you turn concepts or data into a first draft, or alternatively, to turn your draft into a submittable manuscript.
You will leave the retreat with measurable progress on your text, strategies to apply to future writing projects, and clearer judgement about if and how you want to draw on AI.
Instruction and application in workshops (8:45 – 12:30)
During morning input sessions, the lecturer familiarises you with central structural and language-related requirements for each section of your text. You are introduced to various resources such as style guides and templates and to digital tools suited to selected writing goals. Hands-on workshop activities allow you to adapt the templates and tools to your discipline, text type and workflow.
Structured text production in writing retreat sessions (13:30 – 15:20)
Dedicated elective timed writing sessions in the afternoons allow you to write and revise your own text according to goals and milestones you set for yourself.
Feedback from the lecturer and peers (13:30 – 15:35)
Feedback from the lecturer available parallel to writing sessions help you improve the quality of your text and steer it towards completion. Informal shared refreshment breaks and focussed 15-minute wrap-ups with peers help you manage targets and maintain motivation.
There will be a one-hour lunch break: 12:30 – 13:30