Do you sometimes find yourself in ‘busy mode’ but not accomplishing much? Do you feel you could be more organized or productive? With the start of the fall semester, it's the perfect time to set some intentions about how you want to spend your time and get prepared!
Get your summer semester off on the right foot by learning how to read smarter, not harder (or longer)!
Graduate Writing Facilitator Jennesia Pedri has generously shared with us a Reading Guide that she created to support her own reading during her comprehensive exams for her doctoral studies in the School of Communications. As Jennesia explains, the guide aims to help you read more efficiently and effectively. It also aims to make itself obsolete: eventually you won’t need it because you’ll begin to automatically ask yourself these kinds of questions as you read.
I'm sure I don't have to mention that it is exam time! In this blog post, Donya Samadi -- PhD student in Educational Psychology and former Graduate Facilitator with the SLC -- shares how the concept of self-explanation can be applied to studying.
Self-explanation, Donya explains, may be beneficial because information previously learned is recalled and integrated with new information to generate a self-explanation. In this way, self-explanation is a connection and elaboration to prior knowledge. When engaged in self-explanations, learners can develop new meaningful associations, and further understand the content they are studying.
Welcome back to the wonderful world of commas!
SLC Writing Coordinator Amanda Goldrick-Jones, PhD, helps us understand the "unwanted comma," or when NOT to use commas in our writing.
Missed Part 1? Check it out here.
Award-winning poet and SFU Communications student Natalie Lim guest blogs for In Common this week!
Check out Natalie's top tips for how a creative writing practice can help strengthen your academic papers. As a bonus, Natalie offers some fun and helpful writing exercises to try out!
Congrats to Natalie for winning the 2018 CBC Poetry Prize with her poem Arrhythmia.
It's a New Year and it's time for a new installment of our Grammar Camp series!
SLC Writing Coordinator Amanda Goldrick-Jones, PhD, is back with a glossary of useful grammar terms to help you with your writing... and with breaking the ice at your next party!
Part-two of Eric Cai's top tips for excelling in university classes that require math and problem-solving.
Want to know more about Eric? Read his In Common welcome interview here.
Many university classes require a lot of math and problem-solving. Eric Cai, the former SLC Peer and guest blogger who we introduced just before the holiday closure, shares his top tips on how to excel in these challenging courses in a two-part series.