UWC Presentations offers workshops and presentations on a variety of writing-related topics, providing cross-disciplinary support for student writers. Our presentations have been developed in-house and have recently undergone substantial revisions and updates. Last year, the presentations team gave 127 presentations across fifteen departments, serving more than 3,344 students. All told, the 2024-2025 school year saw a 20% increase in presentation sign-ups from the previous academic year. We are excited to continue expanding the reach of UWC Presentations across the forty acres!
All presentations are conducted in-person or online by the presentations team. Led by two graduate coordinators, the presentations team consists primarily of graduate students who work at the UWC. They represent a multitude of disciplines, from Philosophy to English Literature to Education to Engineering and more. Whether you are looking for a lesson on lab reports, sentence-level clarity, or literature reviews, the highly skilled and trained presentations team is there to provide engaging, interactive, and effective instruction for your students.
Presentations can be booked by instructors, student organizations, and groups visiting UT. If desired, we will train instructors and teaching assistants to deliver any of our presentations on their own. To help you choose which presentation best suits your needs, read through the descriptions provided below.
Before making your presentation request, please read about our presentations and our policies.
Presentation Policies
Scheduling
Presentations may be scheduled from Monday through Friday, 8:00 a.m. – 6:00 p.m. during the long sessions and from Monday through Friday, 8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m. during the short sessions. Scheduling requests must be made at least two weeks in advance.
If you want to request a presentation or workshop outside of our regular hours, please contact the Presentations Coordinators at uwcpresentations@gmail.com. We do our best to accommodate every instructor’s first date/time preferences.
Please note that the scheduling window does not open until two weeks prior to the start of the new semester. Registration for the 2025-2026 fall semester will open on Monday, August 11th. If you have any questions before then, feel free to reach out to the Presentations Coordinators at uwcpresentations@gmail.com.
Attending
We require the requesting instructor or TA to be present during the presentation. We’ve found that students get the most out of presentations and workshops when their TA or instructor is present. Please do not request a presentation for a day you know you will have to miss class.
For certain workshops, students should have paper copies of their most recent drafts and writing utensils in different colors. Other presentations might offer optional add-ons that require the instructor’s input. Please read the presentations descriptions carefully so that you and you students can be fully prepared for their session.
Presenting
On rare occasions, we are able to give presentations to each section of a course. If your multi-section course has a lecture that everyone attends, please schedule the presentation during the lecture.
The UWC
| NEW: Introduction to the UWC + UWC Class Tour (30-40 min) | Showing your writing to a stranger can be intimidating. To help students feel more comfortable about coming to the UWC, many instructors invite one of our consultants to their class to give a ten-minute presentation. This is a presentation that provides all the essential details about the center (hours, location and policies) and allows students to ask questions about how we can meet their individual needs. Additionally, this presentation includes a tour of the UWC. The presenter will guide you and your students from your classroom to the UWC to show them the space and how to make an appointment. Audience: General, Undergraduate |
| Introduction to the UWC (15-20 min) | Showing your writing to a stranger can be intimidating. To help students feel more comfortable about coming to the UWC, many instructors invite one of our consultants to their class to give a ten-minute presentation. This is a presentation that provides all the essential details about the center (hours, location and policies) and allows students to ask questions about how we can meet their individual needs. Audience: General, Undergraduate |
| Graduate Services at the UWC (15-20 min) | This is a presentation that introduces the UWC’s services for graduate students, including consultations, writing groups, retreats, and workshops. It is available for graduate seminars, orientation events, and informal graduate student groups. Printed brochures on UWC Graduate Services are also available upon request. Audience: General, Undergraduate |
Writing Processes
| Managing College Writing (45-50 min) | (Formerly known as “Transitioning to College Writing”) |
| Managing Graduate Level Writing (45-50 min) | (Formerly known as “Transitioning to Graduate Level Writing”) |
| Developing Writing Partnerships (30-35 min) | This is a presentation that gives suggestions on how to select an accountability partner, provides a structure for holding you and your partner accountable, and outlines strategies for setting and keeping goals using mental contrasting. |
| Writing Groups (30-35 min) | Designed for graduate students, this is a presentation that introduces the benefits of writing groups, which provides structure, accountability and encouragement. The presentation includes an overview of the UWC’s group services for graduate writers, strategies for asking for help with writing and giving feedback on others’ work, and ideas for how to start your own writing group. This presentation is available for graduate seminars, orientation events, or informal student-led groups. |
| Long-Term Writing Projects (30-35 min) | |
| Avoiding Plagiarism (30-35 min) | This presentation advises students on how to research and write in an academically responsible way. Specifically, it defines plagiarism and academic dishonesty; discusses why academic honesty is important; and advises students on some best practices for avoiding plagiarism in their own writing. This presentation does not cover all the discipline- or style-specific rules for citing sources. It is intended to be generally applicable to any academic or professional discipline that adheres to Western notions of intellectual and academic honesty. |
Writing Skills
| *Note About Writing Skills Presentations | An asterisk indicates that the presentation in question offers an optional workshopping component. If your class has written a draft, they will be able to use it in the presentation. The presenter will ask your students to select one body paragraph and revise it based on the skills learned in the presentation. |
| *Writing Body Paragraphs in Academic Essays (45-50 min) | This presentation helps demystify the academic body paragraph. Students will first learn about the functions of different body paragraphs and the “shapes” and “turns” of effective ones. From there, students will practice concrete skills like writing clear topic sentences, supporting claims with evidence, staying on topic, transitioning from one idea to the next, drafting effective concluding sentences, and more. |
| *Moving From One Idea to Another: Paragraph-Level Cohesion and Flow (45-50 min) | This presentation takes two of the concepts in the “Writing Body Paragraphs in Academic Papers” and expands upon them. Ideal recipients are students who understand the overall function of body paragraphs and how to incorporate textual evidence but who need more assistance with clarity of thought and transitions. Students will receive explicit strategies for using transition words and phrases, incorporating pointing words and phrases, repeating ideas “with a difference,” and splitting up lengthy, confusing sentences into more digestible ones. The techniques and skills are designed to be memorable and directly applicable to future writing assignments. |
| *Incorporating Textual Evidence (45-50 min) | This presentation takes one of the concepts in the “Writing Body Paragraphs in Academic Papers” and expands upon it. Ideal recipients are students who need extra assistance with finding, evaluating, incorporating, and citing textual evidence. We cover topics such as reading and annotating for textual evidence; collecting and evaluating textual evidence; knowing when to use paraphrasing, summarizing, or quoting; blending quotations; incorporating in-texts citations and works cited pages; explaining and analyzing textual evidence; and more. We are happy to tailor this presentation to better fit the textual evidence conventions of your discipline. Please send us an email at uwcpresentations@gmail.com and share your discipline, assignment details, and any special requests that you have. Please note that we do not offer presentations on specific documentation styles. All examples provided in our presentations use either MLA or APA. Though we address citations and formatting, we do not go into depth. Our website offers resources on documentation styles and can be used to supplement your instruction. |
| *The Most Common Grammar “Gotchas” in Undergraduate Writing (45-50 min) | This presentation tackles the nebulous, often fraught concept of “grammar.” We begin by briefly unpacking the term, asking students to consider grammar from three different angles. From there, we help students see that grammar is not always a prescriptive, arbitrary list of dictates; instead, we should use grammatical principles to help us communicate more clearly to our readers. The rest of the presentation covers the most common grammar “gotchas” of 2025, including confusing comma usage, accidental fragments, modifier errors, parallel structure, and cluttered sentences. Students will not just learn about these topics but will practice identifying and remediating them. This presentation comes with a handout that can be used throughout the semester. |
| *Sentence-Level Clarity, Or Minimizing the “Official Style” in Graduate-Level Writing (45-50 min) | It is a truth universally acknowledged that graduate students sometimes over-write. Take the following two sentences: “It is a widely-held belief that the social significance of smoking receives its clearest explication through an analysis of peer interaction among adolescents. In particular, there is a dearth of studies that focus on the manner in which interactive behavior is conditioned by social class.” In this presentation, we name (but do not shame!) this form of academic writing, sometimes referred to as the “Official Style.” From there, we present a multi-step strategy for revising such writing, giving graduate students the tools to make their writing more direct and less bloated. Students will practice these skills with example texts and, if available, their own writing. |
| Revision Workshop | Sometimes, peer revision workshops begin with good intentions but conclude with less-than-stellar outcomes. If this has been your experience as an instructor, then this presentation is for you! This revision workshop gives your students concrete exercises that they can apply to their own and their peers’ writing. Students will learn revision techniques that will enhance their higher-order writing skills, including B.L.U.F., reverse outlining, sentence combining and reduction, and more. These techniques will help your students craft clearer arguments, draft more effective topic sentences, organize their body paragraphs and ideas more logically, and connect ideas within paragraphs more cohesively. Students should leave the session not only with clearer prose but enduring writing schemas that they can apply to future assignments. This presentation requires that all students have at least one body paragraph of a draft written, either printed or accessible on a digital device. Please ensure that your students have at least two colored highlighters, a writing utensil, and extra scratch paper. |
Writing Genres
| Note: Literature Reviews Presentations | You asked, and we delivered: we now have two separate literature review presentations, one for the humanities and one for the social sciences and STEM fields! Our new literature review presentations are also now divided in two. The first presentation covers the pre-writing and research stage, and the second focuses on the writing and revision process. We highly encourage you to schedule both presentations, with at least a week between each session. |
| Writing Literature Reviews in the Social Sciences / STEM, Part 1 (45-50 min) | Academics know that “writing” a literature review involves much more than just writing. Indeed, there are many steps scholars must take before they sit down to actually draft their findings. Many students, however, do not receive explicit instruction in how to manage this cumbersome and time-consuming process. The result is often a less-than-stellar final product—not because the students are poor writers, but because they overlooked crucial steps in the pre-writing stage. In part I of the Writing Literature Reviews in the Social Sciences STEM presentation, students will learn about the research synthesis genre and the characteristics of different types of syntheses. From there, we present students with a five step process to the pre-writing phase. Students will get to choose an organizational system, navigate around the UT Libraries website, pick time management techniques that motivate them, practice skilled reading and note-taking, and much more. Note: The librarians at UT offer more detailed presentations on navigating scholarly databases, formatting search terms, using Boolean terms, etc. |
| Writing Literature Reviews in the Social Sciences / STEM, Part 2 (45-50 min) | |
| Writing Literature Reviews in the Humanities, Part 1 (45-50 min) | Any good academic knows that “writing” a literature review involves much more than just writing. Indeed, there are many steps scholars must take before they sit down to actually draft their findings. Many students, however, do not receive explicit instruction in how to manage this cumbersome and time-consuming process. The result is often a less-than-stellar final product—not because the students are poor writers, but because they overlooked crucial steps in the pre-writing. Part I of the Writing Literature Reviews in the Humanities presentation is divided into four sections. First, we define the literature review genre and discuss the ways conventions and expectations vary across disciplines. Next, we provide students with concrete organizational and note-taking skills that set them up for success. From there, we show students multiple ways of interacting with their notes and findings in order to inspire meaningful analysis. Finally, we cover some common challenges writers often face when tackling literature reviews and then offer multiple solutions to these challenges. Note: The librarians at UT offer more detailed presentations on navigating scholarly databases, formatting search terms, using Boolean terms, etc. |
| Writing Literature Reviews in the Humanities, Part 2 (45-50 min) | |
| Writing Research Papers, Part 1 (45-50 minutes) | In part I of the Writing Research Papers presentation, students will learn the steps they need to take before they sit down to write a research paper. This explicit presentation guides undergraduate students to choose an organizational system to store sources and notes; ask fruitful research questions and seek out appropriate sources; leverage resources provided by the university; set realistic goals and utilize effective time management skills that work for them as individuals; manufacture accountability to prevent procrastination; engage in effective reading and note-taking practices, and much more. Our main point of emphasis is that research is a process, an opportunity for students to learn—not “quote hunt” for evidence that aligns with their preconceived notions. By equipping students with explicit structures and guidance, they are more likely to engage in this process rather than circumnavigate it. Note: The librarians at UT offer more detailed presentations on navigating scholarly databases, formatting search terms, using Boolean terms, etc. |
| Writing Research Papers, Part 2 (45-50 minutes) | |
| Writing Lab Reports (45-50 minutes) | This presentation discusses best practices for planning, creating, and revising lab reports in STEM and social sciences. It covers the different sections of a report (title, abstract, materials and methods, etc.) and details the goals of each. It also advises on cultivating the concise, direct, and active sentence-level style that is particularly important in science writing. Practice exercises help reinforce topics covered in the session. |
| Writing Abstracts (30-35 minutes) | This presentation begins with the definition and purpose of abstracts. From there, we go over strategies and tips to compose abstracts for an intended audience before hosting an interactive workshop. This portion of the presentation allows students to jumpstart their writing process in class. We use activities to show students how to pull information from their larger work to draft content for their abstracts. Please ensure that students will have a finished draft of their larger work by the day of the presentation. |
| Writing Personal Statements (45-50 minutes) | Advising students to “Show, not tell” in their writing is a well-intentioned but often fruitless exercise. Many students have heard this pearl of wisdom over and over again, but just as many have received little-to-no guidance on how to do it. This presentation prepares undergraduate students to develop and write effective personal statements for internal transfers, graduate school, medical school, law school, and beyond. We begin by explaining the significance and general expectations of a personal statement, considering key features like genre/discipline, audience, and more. From there, we go over the different kinds of prompts and word and character-limit requirements and offer suggestions for how to tackle the prompts and write within tight constraints. In a particularly helpful section, we juxtapose two essays, one that falls into the trap of “resume dumping” and one that tells a more coherent narrative. Next, we go over some rhetorical structures and moves that are commonly deployed to great effect in application writing. We also offer a list of “do’s and don’ts” that address questions we frequently receive on this topic. Finally, we conduct a brainstorming session to help students get started on their writing process. |
| Creating Resumes, CVs, and Cover Letters (45-50 minutes) | This presentation positions the resume, CV, and cover letter as persuasive documents, providing writers with strategies for constructing effective materials. We begin by explaining the purpose and general structure of each document, emphasizing the key differences between each one. In doing so, we present example resumes, CV’s, and cover letters as references, helping students to visualize the layout of their materials. In one particularly helpful section, we juxtapose two cover letters, one that falls into the trap of “resume dumping” and one that tells a more coherent narrative. With these two examples side-by-side, we guide the students to recognize the inherent strengths of the latter. We also provide students with a bank of section headings and action verbs that they can use to describe and organize contributions to previous work/academic experiences. Finally, we suggest methods for generating content and walk students through a brainstorming activity. |
Additional Support
Interested in other ways the UWC can support you? Head over to our How We Help page to find out about all the services available to you at the UWC.