Academic Skills Project - English Literature
This page contains details of the English Literature ASP workshops run by the School of English. All workshops are aimed at a sub-honours audience. For further information and to register for these workshops, contact the School ASP Coordinator Laura Greene by email at lg215@st-andrews.ac.uk.
Programme details:
Semester 1:
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Date: 19/09/2025, Time: 2pm-3pm
Leader: Alice Remmington
Location: Garden Seminar Room, Kennedy Hall
Using secondary sources in your essays can feel like a delicate balancing act. How do you engage comprehensively with the research published on your chosen topic without swamping the body of your essay with citations and overshadowing your own ideas?
This hands-on workshop will give advice on how to find, evaluate, and incorporate secondary sources into your writing as a foundation for your own arguments. With this aim in mind, we will look at example literary articles and discuss how we might approach them critically and how to reference them in an essay. We will also evaluate the success of two different essays on their engagement with secondary sources.
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Date: 22/09/2025, Time 2pm-3pm
Leader: Nilanjana Goswami
Location: Room 20, Butts Wynd
Texts are like assembly-line machines, where various parts work together to produce a greater whole. This is especially true for poetry, where rhythm, metre, syntax, image, context all contribute to meaning.
This workshop will explore close reading as the most effective academic skill for analysing poetry. After a brief introduction of the method, its components, and aims, it will help participants close read a few different forms of verse across different periods of English literature.
By the end of this workshop, you will be able to pick up on significant aspects of vocabulary and syntax that make poems tick.
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Date: 26/09/2025, Time: 2pm-3pm
Leader: Nilanjana Goswami
Location: Garden Seminar Room, Kennedy Hall
Close reading is an essential skill for analysing prose as well! This workshop will begin by exploring why and how close-reading verse and prose differ. Participants will then work in teams to parse extracts from a few different genres of prose across the history of English literature.
By the end of this workshop, you will be able to identify and analyse important metrics – like voice, character, context, genre – that help a prose extract say what it wants to say. You will also be able to flexibly apply this skill to analyse different kinds of texts: prose and verse.
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Date: 30/09/2025, Time: 2pm-3pm
Leader: Oscar Haines
Location: Room 20, Butts Wynd
As the First Folio’s address to ‘the great variety of readers’ tells us, plays have long been read as literary works in their own right and not only as entertainment or performance. Yet what expectations and approaches does a solitary, critical reader bring to a text that differ from those of the communal experience of a laughing or weeping audience? Particularly as your scholarly interests may lead you away from the beaten path of oft-performed plays towards obscurer works, what critical strategies can you employ to negotiate your readings of these texts which may lack a helpful critical apparatus? And what on earth does “Exit, pursued by a bear” actually mean?
Drawing from a variety of plays both familiar and unfamiliar, in this workshop we will consider ambiguities in stage direction, historical conventions of performance, and the role of the reader in constructing meaning from a text.
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Date: 7/10/2025, Time: 2pm-3pm
Leader: Lucy Turton
Location: Room 20, Butts Wynd
Editing your academic writing is one of the most essential skills to help take your academic writing to the next level. But what are the most important and efficient steps to ensure your approach to revising is perfecting, not pedantic?
In this practice-based workshop aimed at sub-honours-level students, we will examine the different stages of editing your work and explore some processes and resources to improve your essay with every re-draft. We will primarily focus on polishing essay structure and language, with reference to the School's key criteria for a first-class essay.
Students are strongly encouraged to bring along their own samples of writing to practice editing and revision skills and receive feedback on their work.
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Date: 4/11/2025, Time: 2pm-3pm
Leader: Lucy Turton
Location: Lawson Room, Kennedy Hall
You might know that the word ‘essay’ originates from the Old French assai, ‘a trial or test’, but what if you try something in your writing and come up short? It can be emotionally and intellectually challenging to process tutor feedback, but it is one of the most integral skills for improving your work.
This workshop will help you to understand, reflect on, and apply feedback from your essays in a relaxed and judgement-free space. Students are strongly encouraged to bring along their own essays and feedback to practice the strategies introduced in the first part of the workshop, with the aim of producing a clear plan for how to implement and improve from feedback in future assignments.
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Date: 7/11/2025, Time: 2pm-3pm
Leader: Alice Remmington
Location: Garden Seminar Room, Kennedy Hall
Comparing two texts in an essay often leads to knotty questions of style. Is it better to discuss both texts in each paragraph, keeping them closely connected, or give each their own sections and thread them together with a consistent, overarching argument?
Put another way, how do you draw out the nuances of each separate text without losing a clear, cohesive direction in your comparative analysis?
In this short workshop, we will approach this question together by comparing excerpts from a selection of texts, formulating our own critical arguments, and discussing the benefits of different approaches to writing structure based on official essay criteria and our own personal aims.
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Date: 10/11/2025, Time, 2pm-3pm
Leader: Esther Zitterl
Location: Room 20, Butts Wynd
Ready to move from describing what others think to making arguments that matter?
This workshop focuses on building the confidence and skills to write with a clear, authoritative voice. We will examine what it means to think critically about texts and ideas, moving beyond personal opinion to scholarly analysis. Together, we will look at how to use secondary sources effectively, weigh up different perspectives, and position your ideas in relation to them.
Through short exercises and examples from literary essays, we will explore how structure, style, and evidence can help you establish your critical presence on the page. Whether you are just starting out or want to refine your approach, this session will support you in developing the clarity, conviction, and intellectual independence that make academic writing compelling.
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Date: 24/11/2025, Time, 2pm-3pm
Leader: Esther Zitterl
Location: Room 20, Butts Wynd
Exams ask you to think fast, stay focused, and express your ideas clearly under time pressure. This workshop offers practical strategies for approaching essay-based exams with confidence. We will address common concerns like mind blanks, time management, and how to demonstrate your knowledge effectively when feeling under pressure. We will cover everything from close reading to comparative essays, discussing how to make the best use of your knowledge when notes are not allowed.
Along the way, we will practise techniques for organising your time, recalling and weaving in quotations, and keeping your argument coherent even in timed conditions. Using examples from EN1003 but relevant to many subjects, this session aims to make exams feel less daunting and more like an opportunity to show your best thinking. By the end, you will be equipped with tools to stay calm, focused, and effective in the exam room.
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Date: 28/11/2025, Time, 2pm-3pm
Leader: Oscar Haines
Location: Garden Seminar Room, Kennedy Hall
The quality of your revision, and your strategies in bringing it to bear in your exam writing, is of more importance than its quantity. Rather than memorising cantos of poems and pages of criticism, it is far more judicious to learn material which you can deploy effectively in various contexts to answer different questions.
Throughout your modules you will have accumulated masses of notes, from primary texts, critical reading, lectures, and essays. This workshop will address how to sort through this material and organise it for revision. We will discuss the skills and techniques which allow you to synthesize the information you have studied throughout the semester into small memorable pieces which will be useful for any exam question.