Writing Support

As Director of Graduate Writing Support in the Faculty of Arts & Science at the University of Toronto, I teach and support graduate students in various capacities, using various formats. I have worked with graduate students from every academic unit within the Faculty of Arts & Science.

Most of my workshops are invited by faculty or graduate students within departments, so feel free to contact me (daniel.newman{at}utoronto.ca) with ideas, suggestions or requests. Increasingly, I am doing workshops within existing graduate courses, professional-development seminars and other departmental activities. See the list below for ideas of what’s possible.

To learn about upcoming writing-support events, enroll in the ASDO Quercus page, where I post announcements and other information about upcoming events. (The page is shared with Dr. Joel Rodgers, who runs events related to doctoral professional development.)

My writing-support activities fall into two broad categories, which overlap somewhat:

  1. Helping graduate students improve their writing skills (genre, style, mechanics)
  2. Helping graduate students navigate the writing life (productivity, writing habits, accountability, community)

They can also be divided into two broad formats:

  1. Workshops (clinics, modules and roundtables). Clinics are one-off (usually 2-hour) events, half or fully devoted to instruction. Modules are two or more linked clinics.
  2. Discussion-based seminars, which includes Dissertation Working Groups (Humanities & Social Sciences) and Dissertation & Article Working Groups (Life & Physical Sciences), as well as peer-review sessions, writing camps and roundtables. See below for more information.

Workshops: selected examples

Genre

  • Writing Funding Proposals
  • Dissertation Writing
  • Comps / Prospectus Writing
  • Conference Abstracts
  • Conference Presentations
  • Major Research Genres (module)
  • Writing Journal Articles
  • Turning a Chapter into an Article (or vice versa)
  • Writing Article Critiques
  • Writing Literature Reviews / Review Articles
  • Writing Proposals for Theses / MRPs
  • Writing Introductions
  • Strategies for Preparing for, Writing and Revision Comprehensive Exams

Style

  • Strategies for Clear Scholarly Writing / Clear Writing Tricks
  • Developing Your Scholarly Voice
  • Developing Your Scholarly Voice in Ethnographic Writing
  • Argument and Argumentation
  • Uncluttering Your Academic Prose / Strategies for Concise Academic Writing
  • Being Strategic about Sentence Construction
  • Being Strategic about Paragraph Construction
  • The Art of “Flow”: Making Your Prose Cohesive

Process

  • Strategies for Productive Writing
  • Writing Abstracts to Generate New Writing
  • Using Abstracts for Writing, Revision and Summary
  • Creative Writing about Research to Clarify Your Ideas
  • Revision Strategies
  • Editing Strategies
  • From Data to Writing
  • Getting Started on Your Dissertation
  • Motivation and Productivity
  • Writing and Generative AI

Writing for non-specialist audiences (including the public but also academics from other fields)

  • Storytelling about Research in and beyond Academia
  • Writing about Research for the Public
  • Writing Op-Eds

Roundtables: these events, organized and moderated by me, host a small number of faculty and/or graduate-student panelists, who talk and answer questions about a given topic.

  • The Writing Life of Scholars (panelists are members of the unit’s faculty)
  • Publishing Your Work as a Graduate Student (panelists are students who have successfully published peer-reviewed work, as well as faculty members who have edited journals)
  • Professional Development for for Post-PhD Writing Jobs (in and beyond academia)
  • Academic Cover Letters (panelists are members of the unit’s faculty)
  • Writing about Research for non-Academic Audiences (panelists are graduate students involved in popular communication and outreach)
  • Getting Started on a Dissertation (Social Sciences and Humanities)
  • Writing Difficulties in Graduate School
  • From Seminar Paper to Journal Article (Literary Studies)

Discussion-based Seminars

Dissertation Working Groups (DWG): a group of 9 doctoral candidates who meet biweekly for a whole term to workshop drafts of dissertations-in-progress. These run during the fall term and the winter term. Meetings also include occasional writing exercises and brief lessons on writing. To join my Humanities DWGs or my Social Science DWG, first read up on the groups here.

Dissertation & Article Working Groups (DAWG): A variation on the DWG designed for more concentrated writing schedules. Unlike DWGs, which run biweekly throughout the year, DAWGs meet weekly for 6 weeks. They tend to run in the Fall or Winter term. Read more about DAWGs here.

Postdoctoral Proposal Working Groups (PPWG): A variation of the above designed specifically for workshopping research proposals for postdoctoral applications in Humanities & Social Science fields (e.g. SSHRC, Banting, Killam, etc). These groups run annually in May, meeting weekly for 4 weeks. Read more here: https://danielaurelianonewman.net/1852-2/.

Reading toward Writing: A Discussion-based Seminar on the Journal-Article Genre: A new offering in 2025, this one- or two-session seminar will bring together a group of graduate students to study and discuss the rhetoric and structure of three sample journal articles in order to give participants greater familiarity with the genre and better awareness of their own writing practices. The format was piloted in 2025 with two groups: Literary Studies and Human Geography. If demand is sufficient, I will continue offering these in other departments.

The Conferencing Life Cycle: this working group, a pilot project funded by the School of Graduate Studies’s Graduate Education Innovation Fund and the English Department), aimed to help familiarize a group of 8 graduate students with all aspects of finding a conference, writing a strong paper or panel proposal, writing a strong paper and designing effective slides, and giving a strong presentation. The format combines peer-review sessions, mock presentations and some instruction. Piloted in 2024-2025, this working group was highly successfulu and may be reprised in 2025-2026 for a broader audience (literary studies, broadly construed).

Peer-review Sessions: these events allow students to get feedback on pre-circulated drafts of their writing, usually in groups of three. These sessions are often run as a follow-up to a more instructional clinic, most often in the context of grant proposals (e.g. SSHRC or NSERC). Some recent peer-review sessions include

  • Research Proposals
  • Proposals for Post-Doctoral Fellowship Applications
  • Academic Cover Letters
  • Statements of Teaching Philosophy
  • Conference abstracts

Writing Camps: I have run several 2-3 day writing camps for graduate students of any Arts & Science unit, as well as multiple in-house single-department camps (e.g. in Sociology, History, English, Philosophy). Starting in January 2021, I have hosted a virtual writing camp that, currently, runs on Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9 to 12. Any graduate student, postdoc or faculty member can register here.

To find information about and links to enrollment forms, please join the ASDO Quercus page.