Developing young writers
The GCI hosted a paper writing retreat for postgraduate students and a postdoc at the Pullen Nature Reserve.
Paper writing is a critical component when pursuing an academic career. Sometimes researchers can have valuable data but sometimes fail to get published due to inconsistent argument.
The paper writing workshop, facilitated by Prof Kevin Balkwill from the School of Animal, Plant and Environmental Science, is designed to help researchers think through material for a paper and how to formulate strong arguments. The idea is to develop young researchers to become comfortable and build confidence with regard to publishing papers. Publishing papers assist researchers in building their profile in addition to sharing their work to a wider network.
Nine postgraduate students and one postdoctoral researcher from GCI and the broader Wits community attended the workshop (21-27 May 2017). The writing retreat is located in a nature reserve, far away from distractions to provide participants an opportunity to really sit down and focus.
The majority of participants indicated that they attended the workshop to assist in building their writing confidence.
After the workshop, participants were required to complete an evaluation of the workshop. All recipients gave positive feedback with regard to the structure of the course, the facilitator and the value of attending such a retreat.
Some of the feedback from participants included:
- “All aspects of the retreat were valuable.”
- “Most valuable were the slides and the structure of the course. Least valuable were the breaks.”
- “Already changing how I approach writing and planning.”
- “The venue is amazing.”
- “Most valuable was unlocking creative writing. Helped us to keep the end goal in mind which is ultimately getting published.”