Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor: Workshop for Graduate Students on Revision

In graduate school, you may not have the energy to take many classes outside of your discipline. You might feel like you don’t have time to wash your hair. You might think you don’t have a second to stop and focus on writing at the sentence level, so involved do you become in the process of trying to join the academic guild. But learning how to craft good sentences will put you ahead of the rest of the (exhausted, beleaguered, often pretentious) academic pack. In this workshop, graduate students are encouraged to bring papers they are working on to learn strategies to revise their own prose and make it sound like something that was written by a human for other humans.

Rachel Toor's presentations are being brought to you through a collaboration between the Center for Teaching and Learning, the Department of English, Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, the Graduate School, the Office of the Vice President for Instruction, and the Office of the Vice President for Research.  The Writing Intensive Program and the CTL's Writing Fellows Program are serving as administrative sponsors.

Bio:  Rachel Toor, a former acquisitions editor at Oxford and Duke University Presses, is now a professor in the graduate creative writing program at Eastern Washington University. She is the author of four works of nonfiction and one novel. Her work has been published in a wide variety of places, including The New York Times, The LA Times, Inside Higher Ed, Ploughshares, SB Nation, Glamour, Reader’s Digest, Runner’s World and JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association. She was a long-time columnist for Running Times magazine and her essays have been listed as notable three times in Best American Sports Writing and once in Best American Essays. She has written for The Chronicle of Higher Education for the past two decades and contributes a monthly column, “Page Proof,” on writing and publishing. She’s also started a series called “Scholars Talk Writing” where she interviews good academic stylists about their prose, process, and asks for writing tips. Her next book, which will be published by the University of Chicago Press in fall 2017, is for high school students on writing the college application essay. She is a graduate of Yale University and received an MFA from the University of Montana.