Shut Up and Write! is a regular two-hour get-together, where you prioritise writing over everything else.
Write Here Write Now!
Writing your thesis might feel like a monumental task. Join us for our new Write Here Write Now! program to kickstart your writing habit. Get together with your fellow PhD and Masters by Research candidates to write using the Pomodoro technique and share writing tips over a coffee.
The Write Here Write Now! pilot will be held fortnightly from Thursday 18 July to Thursday 10 October, 10–11:30am in the Carlton Library and online.
Shut Up and Write sessions are on hold
Shut Up and Write sessions will be on hold while we trial Write Here Write Now!
Writing doesn’t need to be a solitary activity. It may seem counterintuitive, but writing in the company of others can provide a great boost to your productivity and focus. Shut Up and Write! is a weekly supportive writing session where we meet online for two hours to work on our own writing tasks in a group setting.
Shut Up and Write! as a concept was developed by a writing community in San Fransico in the mid-2000s with the idea of using a support group to help with accountability and motivation. Shut Up and Write! sessions are now held all over the world, with a great adoption in the academic writing community.
Shut Up and Write! uses the Pomodoro Technique, developed by Francesco Cirillo in the 1980s, designed to help minimise distractions and hack our natural attention span to help you stay on task and write a significant amount of words in a short amount of time. Shut Up and Write! consists of four 25-minute writing sprints with a 5-minute break in between, using a timer. Kitchen timers in Italy were often shaped like a tomato, or pomodoro in Italian, hence the name.
What happens at Shut Up and Write!?
The session is led by a friendly and supportive staff member from the Research Plus Team.
- Register to join us via the Research Plus Platform.
- Join via Collaborate Ultra at 10am on Thursday.
- We share our writing goal or task we are working on for the session.
- At 10:05 we start the first 25-minute writing sprint.
- We use a Tomato Timer website and share the screen.
- We all turn our cameras and microphones off, and don’t use the group chat.
- 10:30am we have a short 5-minute break.
- Then we repeat the writing for 25-minutes and 5-minute break pattern until we have completed four writing sprints.
- We wrap up at 12 noon.
Preparing for Shut Up and Write!
Have in mind what you want to work on, and prepare any notes or references that you will need in advance of time. Try to make your workspace free of distractions, close your email and non-writing related applications, and put your phone on silent.
Have a place to take notes, so that if something comes to mind during Shut up and Write! that isn’t related to your writing task at hand, you can make a note and get back to it later.
Enquiries
If you have any questions or suggestions, reach out to the Research Plus team via hdr.researchplus@rmit.edu.au.
