Week 2: Drafting your argument
- Activity: Prepare a section of your project to share with other participants for feedback
- Discussion: What are your writing 'enablers'?
- End of week reflection: How has your project progressed this week?
Generating your draft
Welcome to week 2 of the course!
Your main task this week is to continue drafting your project-in-progress.
Peer review
Now it’s your turn to share your writing-in-progress in order to receive support and advice from your writing partner. Our webinar is a valuable opportunity for you to identify a text you’re happy to share, and check that this communicates your arguments clearly.
Academic writing is seldom a solo activity because as writers we adopt the position of ‘Producer.’ From this perspective we’re concerned with our own ideas and we hold a wealth of information in our heads that is not necessarily explained with our text.
Readers tend to adopt the position of ‘Consumer,’ and readers have different concerns, such as ‘How is this information useful to me?’ and ‘How can I use this research in my own practice?’ Readers often concentrate on the ‘so what’ question.
If we involve readers in giving feedback on a draft, we can benefit from the questions they ask to enhance the clarity and effectiveness of a text. As Producer, a writer should make the final decisions about the main argument and contents, but with input from readers, a greater degree of exteriorisation can be achieved. This means moving from ‘what do I want to write?’ into a reader-friendly position that is also attentive to ‘what do my readers want to learn?’
The great benefit of providing feedback is that you start to get a better sense of the possible weaknesses and limitations in texts. It is much easier to see problems when you are looking at texts as a consumer, and you can take this analytical perspective back when you're writing, and apply it to your own work. So giving feeback is also a nice way to help yourself!
