Category: News

If you have participated in CSU Writes’ offerings over the years, you know that our advice for writing over university breaks is not “one size fits all;” instead, we encourage you to get clear with your priorities and have a fabulous time making your winter break dreams come true.

If you plan to write over break, you can take it easy by identifying specific goals and outcomes you wish to accomplish by mid-January 2025. The key is not to pressure yourself, as you will be more likely to avoid your writing projects. The goal is to engage with you writing tasks productively and pleasurably. You are on “break” after all. Spend a few minutes early in break to craft realistic list of tasks that can be accomplished in the time you wish to allocate for writing (every day or for a few designated days) over break.

If you plan to take time away from writing for most or all of winter break, you will find it much easier to get back into your writing projects if you spend a few moments at the start of break leaving detailed instructions to your future self on where you will pick up your project or projects again in 2025. What will you need to read first? Who will you need to meet with and about what ideas specifically? What ideas will you percolate over the next couple of weeks? A quick sketch can provide great peace of mind while you are away—know that you will come back to greet your project like a familiar friend.

We are grateful to have written alongside or connected to talk about writing in 2024! You are the writers who build CSU Writes. We can’t wait to reconnect in 2025!

FACULTY Writes webinars and workshops address topics of scheduling writing for career building, writing with ease, AI guidance, and effective collaborative writing.  1-Day in-person retreats will continue through the spring semester and expand to three- to five-day retreats in the early summer. To view and register for our FACULTY offerings, visit here. Postdocs and research associates are welcome to register for events in the  FACULTY Writes stream.

GRAD Writes includes a new approach to webinars and workshops this spring. We organized them into topical series to help writers focus on specific areas of writing professional development:

1 – Power of Habit

2 – Smarter, Faster, Better

3 – Super Communicators

Graduate students and postdocs can still register for individual webinars this spring. Those who register for a series will also gain access to additional materials, resources, and community-building through our online learning platform course. For GRAD offerings and to register, visit here.

As always, we are excited to write and work alongside you in fresh and productive ways this spring!

We were thrilled to connect with many of you and to talk about our research and scholarly writing at CSU in fresh ways. You can explore recaps from this exciting and productive fall semester below:

Writing with Creativity and AI – We were honored to host internationally acclaimed author, educator, and expert on academic and writing productivity Helen Sword to CSU in an exciting workshop series open to the broader CSU community. These hands-on sessions guided the nearly 100 writers in attendance through unconventional techniques for tackling writing challenges and bringing more creativity into their writing, some of which included the use of AI writing tools. Check out our article in Source magazine for a detailed look into Helen’s visit.

Learning to Live (and Write) with AI – Peter Gorsuch, research consultant and former Research Editor at Nature, offered a rich discussion of AI use in scientific research writing.  In his talk titled “Taking the Plunge: How Generative AI Can Boost Scientific Writing,” Gorsuch offered just that — a plunge into the exciting (or concerning…or both?) new world of AI writing technologies in its current and quickly evolving state. With the expectation that generative AI will eventually become a fundamental research skill – perhaps sooner rather than later – Gorsuch painted a diverse landscape in scholars’ present attitudes toward AI use in research. Highlighting that an increasing number of scholars appear to be adopting various AI writing and editing tools, Gorsuch stressed the importance that writers understand the fundamentals of how generative AI works as well as the implications of its use on the quality of scholarly writing. To learn more about Gorsuch and his work, visit his website at gorsuchscientific.com.

Book Club: Optimal

Our book club topic this semester centered on how we can leverage emotional intelligence to reach an optimal state of performance while also maintaining balance. After reading the book Optimal by Daniel Goleman and Carr, writers from across campus came together for an engaging, hybrid discussion about what it means to strive for an optimal state of writing success rather than maximum output so as to avoid burnout.

To learn more about the CSU Writes Book Club and to register to join our Spring discussion on Cal Newport’s Slow Productivity, visit our website.

show up & write. and sprint & write.

One of CSU Writes’ flagship programs, show up & write., received an organization and website refresh this fall. We look forward to offering additional drop-in writing sessions both virtually and in locations across campus. This program relies on an amazing team of volunteers to sit as Session Hosts who welcome drop-in writers while also making consistent progress on their own projects. If you would like to dedicate one or two 2-hour sessions each week as a Session Host, please visit here to register. If you know that showing up to write will support your writing next year, check back in early February for our Spring schedule.

Additionally, we launched a spinoff program this fall called sprint & write., which offers timed blocks of writing to provide intense focus and enhanced productivity. These timed sessions are part of the 4-Hour Article Draft method and are valuable for practicing drafting at speed.

• Virtual and In-person 2-hour sessions
• New addition: sprint & write. on Tuesday mornings to support focused drafting
• Check the webpage for virtual Teams access and the times/locations of in-person sessions

Writing is a fundamentally social act. In other words, we always write to another. Even when we journal seemingly only for ourselves, we write to our current or future self, the other part of ourself who needs to reflect on our thoughts, ideas, experiences, and dreams. We need to see what is whirling around in our minds represented on the page to catch our reflection or to provide structure to the whirlwind of thinking.

Writing is also often a solitary act. Particularly in academe, we require the spaciousness of mind that allows us to communicate clearly with future readers of our work. If, however, we are too alone with our thoughts and writing, our focus can turn inward. We can lose sight of our purpose, meander on the page, or become fearful, even anxious, about what we are tasked to write.

How can writing be both social and solitary? There is an obvious a tension between our need to connect with others through our writing and our need for solitary spaciousness to produce our writing.

That’s where write-on-site spaces and events are most helpful.

Writing together in the same place but on our respective projects can help us navigate the tension (social v. solitary) and pressures of research and scholarly writing. Research on retreats and other write-together groups has shown that writing with others can lower task-related anxiety and help writers produce more with greater satisfaction than they would on their own (McLeod, et al. 2012).

To write more efficiently and productively this academic year, we recommend you add show up & write. sessions your calendar, and then simply “show up and write.” You can show up virtual or in-person. You can show up for 15 minutes or for 2 hours or more. Hosted sessions are listed on the CSU Writes website. Most in-person sessions are held on campus in the Walnut Building and are limited to 2-hour time blocks. The virtual sessions are held on MSTeams, and you can drop in whenever suits your schedule, deadlines, and writing energy levels.

Increased focus on goal completion is another benefit of participating in show up & write.. It helps to focus your mind and get settled into your project. When you describe specifically what you are working on to a show up & write. colleague or to yourself in a writing log, you help clarify for yourself, you prime your mind, to focus on the writing task at hand. show up & write. sessions are designed to support writer focus, productivity, and wellness.

show up & write. hosts do not provide feedback on your writing. If you are seeking feedback or a consultation, join a CSU Writes writing group or request a consultation. If English is not your first language, attend INTERNATIONAL Writes where you can talk with a professor of applied linguistics who is trained in providing guidance to English language learners who write for degree completion, publication, or proposal submission.

We are grateful for the fall 2024 host writers who hold a space for writing and are onsite at the times and locations below to write alongside you virtually or in-person:

• Clara Mosso – Mondays/Wednesdays 8-10am & Fridays 2-4pm Walnut 119
• Kimi Conro – Mondays 9-11am, Thursdays 12-2pm, Fridays 12-2pm Virtual on Teams
• Melissa Pickett – Mondays/Wednesdays 12-2pm, Virtual on Teams
• Lauren Vilen – Tuesdays/Thursdays 8-10am, Virtual on Teams
• Kristina Quynn – Tuesdays 9-11am, Walnut 101 & Virtual on Zoom
• Jason Boes – Tuesdays 11am-1pm, Walnut 101
• Kristina Moen – Tuesdays 1-3pm & Thursdays 12-2pm Walnut 101
• Tamanda Chabvuta – Wednesdays Walnut 119
• Luke MacHale – Thursdays 2-4pm Walnut 119

The benefits of writing together are many. show up & write. at a time/location above this semester and see if you too experience greater ease and increased productivity this year.

Competitive grants provide conditional funds—meaning that the grant will be written, funded, and executed for a designated project and purpose. These narrow conditions can heighten grant competition and become daunting for prospective eligible applicants.

To navigate the grant writing process with ease, CSU Writes in collaboration with the Research Acceleration Office designed and piloted the Early-Career Grant Program in spring 2024.

This Early-Career Grant Support Program was part of both offices’ vision to facilitate and advance CSU faculty, research associate, and graduate student success. The program was launched in March and ran through mid-July. The summer sessions provided support for faculty submitting National Science Foundation (NSF) Career proposals.

A primary focus of the program was to provide structure and accountability, support, and encouragement to early career faculty as they navigate complex grant terrains. The program included multiple offerings including in-depth talk on pursuing an NSF grant by seasoned scholars, one-on-one feedback on proposal drafts at various stages as well as peer review. The seminars approached grant writing strategically with an eye to federal funding agencies.

Interestingly, both the RAO and CSU Writes were founded in 2015 to support CSU’s mission of research and scholarly excellence at a land grant institution. These two units have partnered since 2016 on special events to support both individual and collaborative research efforts.

The RAO is housed in the Office of the Vice President for Research and is designed to support both CSU’s contributions to large interagency grants as well as to enhance the competitiveness of individual researcher’s career-defining proposals.

In my recent interview with the Research Acceleration Office Assistant Director, Dinaida Egan and the RAO Proposal Development Coordinator, Lynn Bruning, I learned why the Research Acceleration Office is a great resource for grant writers:

• The RAO can provide researchers with a variety of grant writing and grant support resources.

• They help researchers find funding and partnership opportunities.

• The RAO occupies a unique space at CSU to help researchers progress in their careers and become increasingly successful in researchers.

• They think strategically with researchers about their grant writing specifically in areas like elevating content, connecting with people who share an aligned research interest and appropriate funding sources.
• The RAO is designed to support collaborative projects across colleges to generate high research value and funding.

Learn more about the Research Acceleration Office.

Both CSU Writes and RAO look forward to future opportunities to collaborate in support of your grant projects this coming year.

Navigating competitive funding opportunities in the Liberal Arts and Humanities requires specialized support. Writing applications for funding can be challenging for both novice and advanced grant and fellowship writers. It is easy for all writers to get bogged down in excessive or extraneous details and to then lose track of what will be most important for the future proposal reader and review panel to know. This is where Faculty Recognition can provide unique support for CSU’s College of Liberal Arts (CLA) faculty.

I interviewed Ann Claycomb, the director of Faculty Recognition and the Fulbright Liaison in the CLA Dean’s Office to learn more about the office.

The CLA recognizes the unique standing of humanities research and limited availability of funding in some liberal arts’ disciplines. Therefore, Faculty Recognition exists to bridge the funding gap, elevate CLA faculty internally and connect them to the right opportunities externally to increase the visibility of and support for their scholarship.

Faculty Recognition provides a unique writing support for faculty seeking honorific awards and competitive fellowships. While they primarily focus on tenure track faculty at various levels of their career, they also support non-tenured faculty interested in fellowship applications. Faculty Recognition can help sophisticated and amateur faculty find discipline specific or general fellowships like Fulbright, Guggenheim, and the National Endowment for Humanities.

After identifying funding opportunities, helping faculty write for clarity is a primary goal. Faculty Recognition helps writers fine tune their proposals and applications to answer the most fundamental questions about a project: “What are you doing and why is it important?” They focus on storytelling and help faculty frame a narrative that articulates fund seekers’ ideas and meets funders’ eligibility criteria.

As Ann Claycomb puts it, “We are 100% content oriented as against grant technicalities.” Consequently, Ann offers the following advice about writing a fellowship application:

• Don’t get lost in your own writing.

• Don’t lie in your application.

• Don’t be over ambitious by doing too much.

• Clearly articulate your goals and reasons for seeking the fellowship.

• Go ahead and draft your pitch.
• Send it to the office of Faculty Recognition for feedback.

Whether you are looking to get funding for an ongoing project or a new project, the Office of Faculty Recognition will connect faculty to the appropriate funding resources for a specific project.

Ann Claycomb looks forward to working with you and says “Don’t hesitate…to reach out and say I am looking for funding. It is literally my job to find funding for people.” She also adds that fellowships help you top off your salary and enable you concentrate on a research or book project.

Faculty can contact the director of Faculty Recognition via [email protected].

CSU Demo Day is an annual symposium that spotlights innovative research and celebrates connections between industry and academe across the CSU System and Northern Colorado. Hosted by CSU STRATA, this year’s event took place on Wednesday, April 17, 2024, at the Lory Student Center Grand Ballrooms.

CSU Writes was thrilled to be there, too! CSU faculty, graduate students, alumni and Fort Collins community members visited the CSU Writes table at the event. It was gratifying to talk with researchers about writing as a cornerstone practice and process in professional and career development. We also connected with writers at CSU well versed in the CSU Writes approach to individual and community writer development.

Jason Boes, a PhD candidate from the Chemistry department said his CSU Writes experience was the “most productive I’ve ever been in grad school.”

Alyssa May an alumna and Assistant Director of Analytical Resources Core shared: “The CSU Writes Retreats were an absolute life saver for me for finishing graduate school. The program helped me find the motivation to set aside time to dedicate to writing. I accomplished so much more in the writing retreats than when I worked on my own. I would recommend the program to EVERY graduate student at ALL phases of their degree.”

Three dedicated facilitators and interns represented CSU Writes at this year’s event: Dr. Hana Gatlawi–the facilitator for show up & write., Kimi Conro–the intern supporting DATA groups and special projects, and Nancy Achiaa Frimpong–the Communication intern. They made this year’s Demo Day fun and engaging. Click the link below to see more pictures from the event. CSU @ Demo Day – Made with Clipchamp (1).mp4 (sharepoint.com)

We were grateful to participate in the CSU Demo Day, and we look forward to connecting with more CSU’s writers, researchers, and entrepreneurs at future events!

Are you an international scholar or graduate student? Are you in the process of writing a research article, presentation, poster, dissertation? INTERNATIONAL Writes focuses on challenges encountered by international academic scholars whose first language is not English.

We meet weekly on Thursdays from 10am – 12pm in the Lory Student Center #392—our stress-free, collaborative environment. You can sign up here.

Dr. Luciana Marques, a linguist in Department of English, will bring topics related to manuscript preparation for discussion and consult with individual writers during each Thursday session.

This semester, topics roughly follow the Write to Publish workshop format. Each week, a section of research-based genres is covered, considering its function in a research-based manuscript, such as a research article or dissertation.

These sessions are best for students and scholars who have already conducted research and are at the drafting or revising stage of a manuscript or proposal.

Topics for conversation include:

• Abstract
• Introduction
• Literature review
• Methods
• Results
• Discussion
• Conclusion
• Revision
• Non-experimental research manuscripts
• Organization and flow
• Grammar and style
• Writing for different audiences
• Presentations

Optimal: How to Sustain Personal and Organizational Excellence Every Day by Daniel Goleman and Cary Cherniss

At least once a year (sometimes twice if we become inspired as we have in 2024), CSU Writes hosts a book club conversation. The selected book is almost always a recent release, and it is always relevant to our researchers, scholars, students, and staff who comprise our community of writers at CSU.

This fall our book selection is by the psychologists who coined the term emotional intelligence decades ago, Daniel Goleman and Cary Cherniss. Their new book, Optimal, answers the question all knowledge workers must grapple with today: How do we sustain performance, while avoiding burnout and maintaining balance?

Optimal provides us with a clear, easily read, and thorough response: a method and guide to develop an “inner architecture of having a good day.”

More about CSU Writes Book Club:

While open to all on campus, CSU Writes’ book club selections often focus on the conditions in which we write in academe. The connection to “writing” in our selected texts may, thus, be overt as in the spring semester’s choice of Sönke Ahern’s How to Take Smart Notes (our spring 2024 selection). Or the connection to writing may be implicitly discussed in our book club selection, as in the advice about meaningful productivity in Oliver Burkeman’s 4000 Weeks: Time Management for Mortals or Lee McIntyre’s How to Talk to a Science Denier. All our selected books hold relevance for how we work and communicate best as writers.

This semester’s book, Optimal, addresses how we each might find meaning and fulfillment in our daily lives. Consider that for nearly all of us at CSU, more than half of our waking hours will be spent connected to campus and to our work or to our studies with colleagues. Many of our waking hours will be spent with our fingers to keyboards—writing emails, reports, papers, manuscripts, proposals and more. Optimal provides methods to “build the inner architecture of having a good day,” even as (or perhaps because) we write. If you are part of a research or unit team, Optimal provides invaluable organizational methods to support high-level team performance.

You can register at the CSU Writes website on the Book Club page.

In support of our CSU readers, we can provide books to those who might not otherwise be able to participate. We have 10 copies of Optimal to be distributed on a first come, first served basis.

Join us for a lunch and learn to hear insights on the use of AI for research writing. Our guest speaker, Dr. Peter Gorsuch, is a former Research Editor at Nature and one of the founders of the Nature Masterclass. His talk will focus on the following:

While generative AI is upending functions such as coding and copywriting, it has had limited impact in scientific research writing, in part because of the inherent limitations of large language models and in part because of resistance from writers, funders, and publishers. At the moment, it’s therefore easy to avoid using AI in scientific writing. Yet, some scientific writers find AI extremely useful. The current impasse is not likely to last long – generative AI is likely to become an expected researcher skill, perhaps very soon.

In this talk, Peter will first elaborate on the current situation and how it’s likely to change. He will then lean on his background in author support and his first-hand experience of GPT prompt engineering to identify some practical ways in which AI can nevertheless greatly improve efficiency in certain aspects of research writing.