***Suitable for mid to late-stage PhD students***
Dates you'll need to have available - 19-20 June and 26 June
One of the True North tutors will be in touch to arrange a 1:1 tutorial in between the two weekends.
We have been working with True North, a group of writers and Royal Literary Fund Consultant Fellows Anna Barker, Tina Pepler and Marina Benjamin, who specialise in transposing creative writing techniques into the context of academic writing.
This extended workshop runs over two consecutive weekends, with set ‘homework’ and individual tutorials taking place during the intervening week. It is designed to help you build structural integrity and argumentative coherence into your PhD at a time when you might feel overwhelmed by the many pathways your research opens up to you. This ‘muddled middle’ phase of writing is also a very creative time, and the professional writers leading this workshop will help you harness your best ideas and inspirations so that you can review and refresh your commitment to your thesis.
First Weekend:
Day One: Structure, coherence and flow. You will focus on finding the through-line in your work, plotting your argument, revisiting, revising and ranking your key questions, and identifying the nature of your personal investment in your work – since that is linked both to impetus and to your direction of travel.
Day Two: Voice, openings and ‘connective tissue’. This day is devoted to the business of making yourself present in your work.
Second Weekend:
Day Three: Embracing your obstacles. This final day will embed the shift in self-assurance achieved over the week. We focus on articulating - and sometimes embracing - the obstacles in your way, and showing how metaphor and genre can deepen your research and add nuance, without generating needless complexity.
By the end of the course:
You will have developed a tool kit for navigating your way through the creative chaos that often characterises PhDs at this stage.
You will have learned some of the creative writing techniques that can amplify the most persuasive, compelling and engaging aspects of your research – with no loss of academic rigour.
You will know how to think like a writer, and understand the interplay between investment, structure, and your personal writing practice.
You will better know what you can bring to your research that is distinctive and original
Terms and conditions
The following groups are eligible to attend the training
CHASE funded and associate PhD students,
Arts and Humanities PhD students at CHASE member institutions,
and students and members of staff at CHASE partner institutions
Arts and Hum PhD students (via the AHRC mailing list)
By registering you are requesting a place on this training programme or selected sessions that form part of the programme.
If you can no longer attend, please email enquiries@chase.ac.uk so that your place can be reallocated. CHASE training is free to attend and events are often oversubscribed with a waiting list. Failure to notify us of non-attendance in good time (ideally 5 days prior to the workshop/programme) means your place cannot be reallocated and may result in your access to future CHASE training being restricted.