Organizational Dynamics Writing Workshop with Janet Greco
Seminar writing assignments are tools for learning and for communications. The process of writing focuses thinking to assist the writer in making sense of and integrating new knowledge. Papers in this program also enable participants to shape and communicate this new knowledge in ways that are helpful personally and professionally.
Because the discipline of writing for academic purposes is based on skills that are not common to business writing and because the writing process is central to learning in this program, Organizational Dynamics offers a series of free workshops designed to assist participants in developing efficient, reliable, and fruitful academic writing techniques. Students have consistently found extraordinary value in what they learn here.
New students and capstone writers are strongly encouraged to attend all three classes.
About Janet Greco
Janet Greco is Co-President of Transition One Associates, a management consulting firm that specializes in enhancing the effectiveness of individuals, groups, and organizations as they manage major change and development.
Dr. Greco teaches Dynamics 673, “Stories in Organizations: Tools for Executive Development," Dynamics 501 Fundamentals of Organizational Dynamics, and on the faculty of many Wharton Executive Education leadership programs. She was a charter member of the Pennsylvania Writing Project and has been teaching Organizational Dynamics' Writing Workshops for many years.
Read Dr. Greco's full faculty profile.
Contact Professor Greco
Email | jlgreco@sas.upenn.edu
Phone | 215-898-6967
Registration
Workshops are free and open to all Organizational Dynamics students. However, if you register to attend a session but do not show up, or do not cancel at least 24 hour before the start of the class, or do not provide a compelling excuse for your absence within 24 hours after the class, you will be charged $50.00 for each workshop class you miss. Workshops meet in the Program Office, Suite 328A, 3401 Walnut Street.
For more information regarding the workshops, email Janet Greco (jlgreco@sas.upenn.edu).
Dynamics students can register for the following workshops by logging in and selecting Registration » Register for a Workshop (in the top right corner).
From Memos to Footnotes: Moving from Business to Academic Writing
As a business professional you write all the time. Like a sprinter moving into long distance running, however, you'll need to develop a different level of endurance and a new set of muscles. Which skills will you still be able to rely on in approaching the assignments from your seminars? What new techniques and conventions should you add to your repertoire of writing styles and processes?
This class will set forth some of the expectations of academic writing and suggest profitable ways to plan your seminar work. We also review techniques for using and citing source material, a fundamental academic skill. One special focus will be how to smoothly and correctly weave the words and ideas of others into your own prose.
The Reliable Writing Process
Incorporating graduate study into a full adult working life requires wizardry of scheduling and dexterity in moving quickly through assignments in your date book. When one of those assignments is a paper, how do you plan and organize your time so that the assignment works for you—both as a learning tool and as a communications tool—and so that you can work to high standards that you and the faculty expect?
This workshop offers a formula for breaking down the writing process into a reliable set of steps which help transform intent into results.
Setting the Writing Problem: Making the Assignment Work for You
One of the real challenges of academic writing as an adult learner is to identify concepts or questions within a given topic area that truly interest and energize you and then to organize them effectively within the framework of the assignment as set by the instructor. This means being able, for example, to move clearly from theory to application, from analysis to synthesis, or from description to critique. You'll also need to predict whether a concept can be done in three pages or twelve.
This workshop provides practice in setting and developing workable thinking/writing tasks to meet the requirements of your seminars. We will look at a variety of ways to frame questions and to organize responses so that both you and the reader can follow and benefit from your thinking.
