As all of us in academia know, the writing process rarely begins with a blank Word document titled, “rough draft.” It begins with an idea, notes jotted into a notebook, a lot of (annotated) reading, study design, data collection, and a whole host of other steps before the aforementioned Word document even exists. Large-scale writing projects can be daunting, not only because they require a lot of hard work, but because organizing oneself can be challenging.

Before UCSD went fully remote, I attended a graduate writing retreat to make progress on my qualifying paper. The writing retreat, hosted by the Teaching + Learning Commons (TLC), is meant for those with large writing projects (e.g. qualifying papers, dissertations, etc.). It was my first time attending a writing retreat. I expected attendees to spend the entire time quietly working, but the TLC structured the time such that students first learned how to efficiently work. Below is one of the most-helpful handouts that they gave to us.