Writing (lecturers)

Teaching resources to help you to develop your students' skills. You can adapt these materials to suit your own needs; see the link below for more details about acknowledging Skills@Library.

Using our resources

Workshops: lesson plans, slides and handouts

Each of these three workshops includes a lesson plan, slides, and all relevant handouts.

Planning and preparing your essay (PDF): provides a general introduction to the early stages of essay writing. It helps students to think about the essay title and how they are going to approach their answer.

Getting something down on paper (PDF): aimed at students who find it difficult to make the "transition to task" of writing. It suggests ideas to help students who suffer from writer's block and don't know how to actually "get something down on paper".

Planning your undergraduate dissertation (PDF): uses practical exercises and time-management techniques to help students tackle the early stages of researching, drafting and planning their dissertations. Finding information for dissertations is covered in another workshop.

Individual face-to-face activities

Each of these activities includes teaching notes and all relevant handouts.

Understanding assessment criteria (PDF)
A card-sort exercise designed to give students a better understanding of assessment criteria.

Generating ideas (PDF)
Encourage students to work collaboratively and collect ideas and thoughts about how they would respond to an essay question.

Working back from deadlines (PDF)
Stimulate a mental shift in students and encourage them to start project-planning large pieces of work by breaking them down to key stages which all have their own deadlines.

SMART objective planning (PDF)
Encourage students to make their objectives Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic and Time-bound.

Signposting exercise (PDF)
Highlight signposting techniques that students can use in their written work to indicate where they are going to take their reader.

Free writing (PDF)
Students who don't know how to start writing may benefit from using free writing techniques. This process helps to unlock content for students who are so worried that their initial text has to be perfect that their writing "freezes".