What a view, what a location!

I am at a Writing Retreat, what a great opportunity, I can’t quite believe this is work related, I have been given some dedicated time to write up recent scholarship work that a colleague and I have undertaken.

I have been pleasantly surprised how easy I have found it to be in the ‘zone’ to get writing and produce small sections of content and larger plans for the final output and of course taken time out from that work to complete this blog post.

It has been extremely helpful to do this with a group of colleagues, we have all helped each other with ideas, content and have sense-checked approaches and helped to validate project activities and most importantly the findings of the work. This informal peer-to-peer support has been most valuable and working in companionable silence has not been distracting it has actually helped support the act of getting your head down and getting some writing done. The odd break to have a conversation and a tea break has not hurt at all either!

The Writing Retreat started off with a briefing from a colleague facilitating the two-day event- this briefing I found most useful, as it helped approaching the task of writing up a project report, and minimising that moment of pressure when you open a Word document and write just the title and think, where do I go from here?

These are some highlights from the briefing session, which I found most useful:

Scholarly work has different outputs, and often you are speaking to different audiences, so your outputs might be blog posts, academic posters, workshops, websites, conference presentations and journal articles.

There was a nice point made about the ‘labour of language’ that writing is hard work, and while it is not manual work, nor physical labour it is not easy, and we do need to remind ourselves that this is hard work and an evolving process, not piece of writing is ever finally finished.

Some things to think about, Who are you writing this for? What is in it for the reader? Who are the stakeholders? What are your recommendations?

Some practical helpful points

· What is your key message (and make sure you don’t have too many)

· Check your text, against your key points or arguments

· Don’t be afraid to make substantial changes

· Draft for the gap, you might need to explain your work, don’t assume the reader will know it all

· We do have ‘a writer responsible’ culture, where the author does the work and makes sense of the content for the reader- where in other cultures this can be reversed.

We all get a bit stuck from time to time and sites like these help http://www.phrasebank.manchester.ac.uk/

What opportunities like this have told me is that I can and do have a lot to offer in this space, I might produce work in an alternative way to some of my colleagues, I do lean more towards the informal dissemination routes however there is nothing wrong with that, if it suits the audience I need to communicate with. I have found since completing my Fellowship and Senior Fellowship with the Higher Education Academy (HEA) I am more confidant in writing up work like this, as I know I have done it before and to a robust and accredited standard.

So, I will wallow in this opportunity, these amazing surroundings and engage in the labour of language.