On Wednesday July 7th, Dr Jane Secker and myself will be hosting our final LEaD Writing Group of the academic year. This group has been running since 2016, and provides City colleagues with space + time to write, technical support for blogging, and general explorations of writing practice. As they have all been since spring…Continue Reading Guest speaker joins final LEaD Writing Group of 2020/21
Last term, like many other activities typically run in-person, Jane and I took our monthly LEaD Writing Group online. The final session of the year included a marvellous guest appearance from Johanna Peyton from the Journalism department. Jo gave a fascinating talk on unlocking your creativity, which can be found in full in the video…Continue Reading 2021 Writing Group dates
As some of you may know, we run the LEaD Blog Writing group, which is an informal network of colleagues who are interested in carving out some time each month to focus on getting some writing done or to get some technical assistance with using the blogging tools that City makes available. The sessions are…Continue Reading Virtualising the LEaD Writing Group
The LEaD Writing Group was established in 2016 at the Learning at City 2016 Conference, by Dan Sansome and Dom Pates. Dan has now left City and the group hasn’t met for a while. But after much arm twisting (i.e. none) Dom has persuaded me to run this informal writing group with him. The group…Continue Reading Calling all City bloggers – relaunch event for the LEaD Writing Group
In our blog writing guidance, we suggest you write with an audience in mind. We discussed this topic in February’s Blog Writing Group. It can be a challenge to think who your audience is. Joseph Lalonde recommends having a specific person in mind to write to. This could be: Your past self Your present self Your…Continue Reading Who’s your audience? I am!
A frequent question in the blog writing sessions is – how can I make my writing more conversational? Relax is my first piece of advice. Don’t worry too much about the grammar and let your personality shine through. Henneke Duistermaat suggests some helpful tips to make your writing sound more conversational: Don’t write for everybody – think about…Continue Reading Want to make your posts more conversational? Read this…
The focus of this month’s writing group was creating blog titles to grab the attention of readers. We looked at advice from Corey Wainwright’s blog post on the subject, which outlined the following key points: Start with a working title – note down a rough title to give you a focus when you start writing a…Continue Reading How to hook readers in with catchy blog titles
October’s Writing Group was our busiest yet, with participants from different City departments and also representatives from the Students’ Union. We continued our focus on editing. This time, using advice from Stephen King, we waged war on the “Atrocity of Adverbs” (Popova, 2013). We read his advice on tightening your writing by avoiding adverbs. In…Continue Reading “Fear is at the root of most bad writing.” Stephen King
This summer the LEaD writing group activities focused on editing. This post outlines the activities so you too can use them to pep up your prose. 1. Hiding the ‘I’ in fiction and non-fiction Blog writing can be a reflective form of writing. As a result, we may use ‘I’ a lot. However, this does…Continue Reading Editing – pep up your prose
Last week saw the monthly meeting of the LEaD Writing Group. This is a brief account of the proceedings and an invitation to join us. As usual, we started with a quick writing activity to introduce an exercise that participants can use to develop their own or their students’ writing skills. This month’s exercise was called…Continue Reading LEaD Writing Group – “I lay awake, unable to sleep, and all because…”