The Writing Center

This workshop focuses on building strong, clear, and well-structured sentences for academic writing. Participants will review essential grammar concepts, including sentence types, common error patterns, parallel structures, and punctuation rules. We will also explore strategies for maintaining cohesion, flow, and clarity in scholarly prose, such as balancing active and passive voice, using nominalization, applying hedging language, and crafting smooth transition sentences.

The writing process is inherently basic yet frequently ignored by graduate students worn out by writing. Perfectionists in particular tend to lose sight of those basics. This session will remind you of the elements of the writing process to help you write better and with less stress.

In this workshop, participants will learn how to effectively search for, evaluate, and synthesize scholarly sources to construct a coherent and well-organized literature review. Topics will include identifying gaps in the literature, developing a critical voice, and ensuring alignment with your research questions.

Participants go through every stage of creating a high-quality capstone project, from selecting a compelling topic to producing a well-structured final paper. This workshop will begin by exploring the essential pre-writing steps, such as choosing a strong topic, formulating research questions, and conducting a systematic literature review, and will walk you through the components of a successful capstone.

Participants in this workshop will learn strategies for developing strong qualitative and quantitative research questions, formulating a clear purpose statement, and articulating the significance of their study. The session also covers how to situate research within existing literature and provide a compelling roadmap for the dissertation.