“Who’s kicking whom?”: Verbs in Academic Writing
Verbs are the drivers of our sentences: they can animate our academic writing or “zombify” it, forcing the reader to plod laboriously through our prose. Why do academic sentences become abstract, stodgy, and lifeless, where no one is doing anything to anyone? Often it’s because writers use weak, “spineless” verbs and write sentences that lack agency (Sword 48). This workshop will help you bring your academic writing (back) to life by making verb choices that are not only grammatical, but precise, vigorous, and stylish.
Please bring a laptop and an academic paper of your own in electronic form to the workshop. (Unlike what we listed earlier on the website, there is no need to bring the excerpt from a published scholarly article.)
Sword, Helen. Stylish Academic Writing. Cambridge, Mass. :Harvard University Press, 2012.
This workshop will be led by Renée Lallier, who teaches academic writing to undergraduate and graduate students at the McGill Writing Centre.
The workshop will be held at McGill's Macdonald campus on Friday, November 1st from 10:00 am to 12:00 pm. Registrants will receive the workshop location in a confirmation email.
Please note that the Macdonald campus is located in Sainte Anne de Bellevue, which is ~45 minutes from the downtown campus. If you wish to register for the downtown workshop on November 8, please go here: https://www.mcgill.ca/graphos/workshops/f19grammardt
This form takes about 2 minutes to complete. You must click submit on the third page of this form to complete your registration.
