Winter 2014 Writing and Research Workshops

The Graduate Writing Center offers a wide variety of writing workshops, ranging from general to more specialized topics, such as academic genres, writing in certain disciplinary areas, or writing English as a Second Language. We also provide information on workshops and services from selected campus offices that that provide assistance with research, data management, and data analysis. Special thanks to our campus programming partners: the UCLA Library, Writing Programs, the Institute for Digital Research and Education, Counseling and Psychological Services, and the Career Center.

General Writing Workshops

Strategic Reading
Rebecca Hill, English
Feeling overwhelmed by your reading lists? Concerned that you are missing the point of what you have just read? Are you taking pages of notes for every article you read? This workshop will cover effective reading and note-taking strategies so that you read more efficiently, assess your reading with a critical eye, and annotate each work so that important concepts are easily accessible. Nota Bene: This workshop does not teach speed-reading techniques.
Two times (same workshop):
Thursday, January 9th, 3:30-5:00pm
Thursday, January 9th, 5:30-7:00pm
Location: Conference Room 4, Student Activities Center (basement level)

Academic Writing Skills Workshop for ESL Graduate Students
Carole Yue, Psychology
In this interactive workshop, ESL graduate students will learn skills and strategies to build their fluency, accuracy, and comprehensibility in English academic writing. In addition, we will discuss useful on-campus, online, and print resources that will help students to work independently to improve their writing. There will also be time for questions and answers about ESL writing issues and concerns. Friday, January 17th, 12:00-2:00pm
Location: Conference Room 4, Student Activities Center (basement level)

The Art of Writing the Literature Review
Renee Hudson, English
This workshop will cover strategies and best practices for writing a literature review, including note-taking strategies, writing process issues, and common organizational patterns. The workshop focus will be on literature reviews for original research projects but will be generally helpful for all literature reviews.
Thursday, January 23rd, 5:10-7:00pm
Location: Conference Room 4, Student Activities Center (basement level)

Grammar & Punctuation 101: A Refresher Workshop
Rebrecca Hill, English
What is the difference between "who" and "whom"? When should I use active or passive voice? When should/shouldn't I use a comma? Designed for both native and non-native speakers of English, this workshop will review sentence structure, punctuation, restrictive/non-restrictive clauses, dangling and misplaced modifiers, pronoun case, relative pronoun use, noun/verb agreement, and passive/active voice. Participants will practice editing for grammatical accuracy in addition to discussing methods and resources for self-correction.
Friday, February 21st, 12:30-2:30pm
Location: Conference Room 4, Student Activities Center (basement level)

Fulbright Fellowships Information Session
Learn about travel, study and research opportunities available to graduate students through the Fulbright programs. Get help with the application process and meet the campus coordinators. All prospective applicants are strongly encouraged to attend.
Thursday, February 27th, 11:00am-1:00pm
Location: Conference Room 4, Student Activities Center (basement level)

Policy Writing: Best Practices in White Paper and Memo Writing
Pauline Lewis, History
This workshop provides an overview of best practices in memo and white paper writing as seen in policy-related fields (e.g., urban planning, public policy, public health, business and education). We will discuss the purpose, organization, and style of this genre of writing. Then we will apply this knowledge through an in-depth analysis of exemplar papers. This workshop is designed to enable you to write effective memos and white papers for graduate and professional settings.
Friday, February 28th, 12:00-1:30pm
Location: Conference Room 4, Student Activities Center (basement level)

Dissertation and Proposal/Prospectus Workshops

Dissertation Writing Groups, Support Groups, and Resources for Dissertators
Dr. Tanya Brown, Counseling and Psychological Services
Erin Brown, History
Marilyn Gray, Graduate Writing Center Coordinator
The workshop will provide information about resources for dissertators and thesis-writers. It will present information on writing groups and support groups, including how to run your own dissertation writing group or writing partnership. Finally, at the end of the workshop, graduate students who are interested in being placed in a writing group will stay in order to form groups and discuss scheduling. If you are interested in being in a group, fill out the writing group questionnaire and bring it to the workshop.
Thursday, January 16th, 5:10-6:45pm
Location: Conference Room 4, Student Activities Center (basement level)

Strategies for Writing the Social Sciences Dissertation Proposal
Stacey Meeker, Information Studies
This workshop will give an overview of the main components of a dissertation proposal in the social sciences and cover strategies for writing the introduction, literature review, methods, and significance sections. These strategies should be adapted to your department's and advisor's expectations about the structure and content of your proposal. If you have preliminary drafts of an abstract or research questions, please bring them.
Thursday, January 30th, 5:00-7:00pm
Location: Conference Room 4, Student Activities Center (basement level)

Sciences Dissertation Proposal Workshop
Sarah Al-Hiyari, Oral Biology
Lauren Krogh, Psychology
Carole Yue, Psychology
This intensive workshop will cover dissertation proposal structure, writing process strategies, and time management. In addition, we will address issues related to the oral portion of the proposal. Please bring an outline of your proposal and an abstract if you have them.
Thursday, February 6th, 5:00-7:00pm
Location: Conference Room 4, Student Activities Center (basement level)

Strategies for Writing the Humanities Dissertation Prospectus
Erin Brown, History
This workshop is geared towards giving incipient prospectus writers the tools to write their prospectus over the course of two months. We will discuss literature review and argument development as well as how to turn the many different pieces of a prospectus into a coherent document. Nota bene: this is meant to be an addition to--not a substitution for--serious discussions with your advisor about what is expected of you in your home department.
Thursday, February 13th, 5:00-7:00pm
Location: Conference Room 4, Student Activities Center (basement level)

Humanities Writing Workshops

Social Sciences Writing Workshops

Science and Engineering Writing Workshops

Applying for the NIH Training Fellowship
Sarah Al-Hiyari, Oral Biology, NIH fellowship recipient
This workshop will cover the basics of an NIH NRSA application including the application process and components. We will discuss preparation, documents needed, and writing strategies. The workshop will mainly focus on NIH grant F31. The workshop will also focus on how to find appropriate materials/resources for a complete application.
Tuesday, January 28th, 5:10-6:45pm
Location: Conference Room 4, Student Activities Center (basement level)

Practical Tips for Writing a Scientific Paper
Carole Yue, Psychology
This workshop will cover the basics of how to plan for, prepare, and organize science-specific writing, including term papers, manuscripts and abstracts. We will also cover style, common structure and tips for avoiding problems such as excess jargon and ambiguously stated hypotheses.
Friday, March 7th, 12:00-1:30pm
Location: Conference Room 4, Student Activities Center (basement level)

ESL Workshops

Email Etiquette at the University
Carole Yue, Psychology
Graduate students will write thousands of emails while getting their degrees—emails that invite professors to serve on dissertation committees, emails that ask for extensions on papers, emails in which they introduce themselves to potential mentors or advisors. Designed for graduate students who speak English as a second or foreign language, this workshop breaks down the language used in making polite requests over email and other email etiquette issues. It also includes opportunities to edit real example emails written by graduate students.
Friday, January 10th, 12:00-2:00pm
Location: Conference Room 4, Student Activities Center (basement level)

Statistical Software Workshops and Consultation

Survey data analysis with Stata 13, Friday, January 10 from 9 a.m. to 12 noon in the Visualization Portal, Math Sciences 5628, sign up.
We will discuss both descriptive and inferential statistics with complex survey data. We will also cover some graphical methods.

Mediation & Moderation using the SPSS Process Macro, Wednesday, January 15 from 9 a.m. to 12 noon in the Visualization Portal, Math Sciences 5628, sign up.
The workshop will show how use Andrew Hays' SPSS Process Macro to analyze models with moderation, mediation and moderated mediation.

Survival analysis with SAS, Wednesday, January 22 from 9 a.m. to 12 noon in the Visualization Portal, Math Sciences 5628, sign up.
This workshop will demonstrate how to analyze time-to-event data through graphical methods and both non-parametric and semi-parametric models. Topics include Kaplan-Meier estimates, Cox regression, assessing proportional hazards, and graphing survival and hazard functions.

Accessing and analyzing CHIS data, Friday, February 28 from 10 a.m. to 12 noon in the Visualization Portal, Math Sciences 5628, sign up.
This workshop will provide an overview of the California Health Interview Survey (CHIS), information on how to access CHIS data and example analyses using CHIS data. Other topics will include pooling multiple years of CHIS data, data linkage and GIS, and imputation of missing values.

Upcoming 2014 R User conference at UCLA: http://user2014.stat.ucla.edu/ .

For walk-in consulting information, Stat books for loan, and the most up-to-date listing of seminars, please see the Statistical Consulting Services web page of the Institute for Digital Research and Education. The Statistical Consulting Services also keep an extensive archive of past workshops.

Research Workshops

Introduction to Zotero (sixty minutes)
Tuesday, January 21st, 5 pm
Find out about the purpose, uses, and features of Zotero, a free, open-source application that helps researchers manage references and notes and create formatted bibliographies. Taught by Margarita Nafpaktitis, librarian, Charles E. Young Research Library. Meet in the Research Library Research Commons Classroom, room 11630F. ( map )

How to Formulate a Research Question (sixty minutes)
Monday, February 10, 2 p.m.
This workshop covers how to move from your own interests to a topic, determine a possible research question, and make a case for the significance of that question. You’ll also learn the components of a strong argument and where to start searching for evidence. Taught by Kelly E. Miller, director of UCLA Library Teaching and Learning Services and head of the College Library. Meet in Powell Library Building, InqLab 1, room 238.

Intermediate Zotero (sixty minutes)
Tuesday, February 11th, 5 pm
Already a Zotero user? Explore more features in this session, including working with groups, sharing bibliographies, generating reports, and more. Taught by Margarita Nafpaktitis, librarian, Charles E. Young Research Library. Meet in the Research Library Research Commons Classroom, room 11630F. ( map )

Research Clinics (two hours)
Wednesday, February 26, 12 pm and
Tuesday, March 4th, 12 pm
Drop in any time between 12-2 pm with your assignment or research project in any stage of completeness. Librarians with expertise in a number of humanities and social science subject areas will be on hand to help you make the most of library resources to move your work forward. Lobby area, Charles E. Young Research Library. ( map )

EndNote for the Social Sciences and Humanities (seventy-five minutes)
Wednesday, February 26, 2 p.m. (rescheduled from January 15)
This hands-on session offers an overview of the EndNote citation management software program, which helps researchers manage and organize their references and automatically create and format citations and bibliographies. Taught by Gabriella Gray, librarian, Charles E. Young Research Library. Meet in the Research Library East Classroom, room 21536. ( map )

Research Guides
Online research guides link to key resources and reference books for certain courses and disciplines. Subject guides, course guides, and general research guides are available.

Research Appointments
Graduate students are encouraged to contact the Library's subject specialists for more specialized and personalized assistance with research, library resources, and subject databases; find a complete list of all subject specialists here.

Copyright Questions
Contact the Library's copyright experts for assistance with copyright, publishing, intellectual property, and other related issues at copyright@library.ucla.edu.

To see the most current schedule of UCLA Library workshops, consult the UCLA Library seminar page.