Helping Honours and Masters Students ‘Write early and write often’

Masters and Honours students writing a thesis or dissertation are often told to ‘write early and write often,’ with many reporting they do not know exactly what this means or how to get started. Taking a more contextual and student-centred approach over the more traditional transmission model of academic writing support (Kamler & Thomson 2008), this paper reports on how STUDYSmarter’s programme for UWA coursework research students has started to embed reflective writing activities into its workshops and online materials in order to encourage students to see and engage in their research as an ongoing cyclical process that includes regular writing, reading, critical thinking, and self-reflective activities. These strategies include encouraging students to sketch out provisional thesis titles and statements, research questions and aims, and using these as the central organising principle for writing research plans, proposals, literature reviews, theses, dissertations and seminar papers. It also looks at a number of practical strategies they might use to get their writing started such as ‘blind writing’ (Phelps et al. 2007) ‘sentence templates’ (Cargill & O’Connor 2009), ‘thinking bundles,’ (Kamler & Thomson 2006; Graff & Birkenstein 2010), and the benefits of keeping a reflective research journal (Jasper 2005; Ortlipp 2008).