We’re glad you found your way to us. We want to make sure every student at the college is empowered to do her best work.

The Academic Writing Centre allows you to work with peer consultants or academic tutors to achieve your goals. We provide a safe place for you to improve your writing, reading, or speaking abilities. We’ll help you with time management, brainstorming, outlining, drafting, and editing your work.

Take the anxiety out of academics and book an appointment with us.

You can also request a workshop.

AWC Workshops

The workshops are sessions structed around a particular topic. We have some general workshops and some specific workshops.

The general workshops can be booked without reference to any particular assignment.

The specific workshops are most helpful if they are goal-oriented, so students are requested to come in groups who are working on a particular assignment. Faculty can also request workshops that teach students to apply specific skills towards an assignment.

Please use this form to request a workshop. Submit the assignment brief with the request if you are requesting a specific workshop.

The workshops we offer are:

• The Busy Student’s Guide to Academic Writing

A one-hour guide to academic writing, and teaches the busy student to work smarter, not harder. An easy-to-follow five step process that will streamline your academic work and show you the path to good grades.

This workshop can be general or paired with a particular assignment, per request.

• APA Made Easy

A one-hour intensive dive into APA 7^th Edition with worksheets and practice. APA can be confusing and scary, but this workshop is designed to be pain-free and help you manage your anxieties around plagiarism and citations.

This workshop can be general or paired with a particular assignment, per request.

• Grammar Intensive

Two one-and-a-half hour workshops on two separate days teach you to locate and correct the common errors students make in their work.

These workshops are for you if you want to take your writing to the next level, or you’ve ever gotten comments about clarity, cohesion, or grammar in your works. This workshop is paired with in-house worksheets, guides, and quizzes.

This workshop is general, but you should bring your writing samples along to apply your knowledge to them and have your peer consultants check them.

• Let your Writing Flow

A forty-minute guide to flow in writing.

This is for you if you feel your writing can be repetitive or awkward, or if you’ve gotten comments from faculty about redundant or fragmented work.

This workshop can be general or paired with a particular, already-checked assignment, per request.

• AI-Powered Work

Beginner: A forty-minute workshop on the use of ChatGPT and Bing’s GPT-3

integration that helps you use accurate prompts and filter information efficiently.

Learn how to make your life easier with AI: generate outlines, sketch out Lesson Plans, summarize readings, paraphrase your work, communicate professionally, and do much, much more.

Advanced: A one-and-a-half-hour workshop that goes beyond OpenAI and Bing. Learn about other apps making use of AI in academic writing – Scite, ResearchRabbit, PaperPal, Lateral – that can save you days of work looking for research and recommend ways to make your writing better. Learn and grow with AI.

These are both general workshops.

 An Introduction to OneNote

A thirty-minute workshop that helps you get the best out of OneNote (already present on your MS Teams!).

Learn how you can take collaborative notes in class, and use Immersive Reader to translate text, see image-definitions, and mark parts of speech.

This is a general workshop.

• The Quick Guide to Reading

A one-hour workshop on reading intensely, with guides and hands-on practice. Apply all you’ve learned here and take the anxiety out of reading academic texts and research papers!

You’ll also learn how to take notes and annotate digitally.

This workshop can be general or paired with a particular assignment, per request.

• The Researcher’s Guide

Two intensive one-and-a-half workshops only for final year students undertaking dissertation.

Learn how to find authentic journals and research papers, and integrate Research Rabbit, Lateral, and Zotero into your process to draft your literature review and summarize your sources.

These are general workshops where we work on parts of a sample dissertation, which will be provided to attendees with annotations and a worksheet.

Workshop Policies:

• All workshops will preferably be in the Golden Hour or the Faculty Meeting slot.
• The workshops must be requested at least two weeks in advance by faculty or a group of at least five students.
• The Academic Writing Centre will do its very best to schedule all workshops, within two weeks of request, on the day you’ve requested.
• If we’re unable to accommodate you on the day you’ve requested, we’ll email you at least three days in advance, and re-schedule.
• All workshops will be during college hours.
• We do not currently accept requests for online workshops.

Work With Us

We are always looking for students who can volunteer as peer consultants and help support their student-colleagues through their learning process. We need volunteers and interns for a variety of support roles; if you’re hard-working, organized, and have excellent organization skills, please apply via this form.

We will get back to you in three weeks if you are shortlisted.