WriteFest 2025

What is WriteFest?

November is Academic Writing Month. This annual event was established as a way to support academic writing via the #AcWriMo hashtag on X (formerly Twitter). Use the hashtag #AcWriFest25 to share your progress with other researchers.

During November 2025, the Institute for Academic Development run WriteFest, a local contribution to this academic writing month, with the aim of bringing people together to raise awareness and celebrate academic writing.

Aims

The festival aims to provide protected time and space for writing to help you to:

Image

During WriteFest the IAD will be running morning and afternoon Writing Retreats and Researcher Writing Hour sessions to provide you with space and time to write, along with a selection of workshops and resources to support your writing.

Below are summaries of what happened during WriteFest in 2022, 2023 and 2024 at the University of Edinburgh:

A summary of WriteFest 2023

A summary of WriteFest 2022

How to get involved

• Book onto a workshop or writing retreat
• We will be regularly blogging during the festival from blogs.ed.ac.uk/iad4researchers  where we will share some experiences, promote events and courses and reflect on academic writing.  Have a look at our previous writing themed blogs.
• Use the hashtag #AcWriFest25 to share your progress with other researchers
• Share any writing top tips and/or writing achievements on our WriteFest Padlet
• Also use the Academic Writing Month hashtag #AcriWriMo to get some inspiration from Academic Writing month overall.

To attend a writing retreat

Choose the one(s) that suit you best (please check you are eligible to attend) and book your place.  Note:  If you are having trouble booking onto multiple writing retreats, please contact iad.researchers@ed.a.uk and we can register a place on your behalf.

This 1-minute video covers what the retreat sessions will, and won't (!) involve.

What is a writing retreat? - video (YouTube)

Resources and Support

Writing Resources: Guides and resources on different writing topics, to give you an opportunity to focus on specific areas of your writing.

Writing Retreat Facilitators Guide (PDF): You may also be interested in running your own writing retreats and to help with this the IAD have produced a ‘Facilitators Guide’ to give you an idea of the structure of different retreats, the things to think about before and during the retreat and your role as facilitator.  If you run a retreat during November, please let us know!

Teaching Matters is the University of Edinburgh’s website and blog for debate about learning and teaching, for sharing ideas and approaches to teaching, and for showcasing our successes, including academic colleagues who are leading the way in delivering brilliant teaching.

Academic Writing: Resources designed to support postgraduate level academic writing skills: the eWriting online course, Writing a First Year Report independent study course, and Writing Up Qualitative Research independent study course.

English Language Education (ELE): offers workshops and one-to-one academic writing tutorials for all postgraduate students (PGT and PGR)

Dissertation and Thesis Festival: The Library's Dissertation and Thesis Festival brings together the support that the Library, Digital Skills and IAD provides for students undertaking their dissertations and theses.  They run two festivals each year (one in Semester 1 and one in Semester 2).

Royal Literary Fund Fellow:  Improve your academic writing by working with a fellow from the Royal Literary Fund. The Royal Literary Fund Fellowship scheme was set up to place professional writers in higher education institutions to offer writing support to all students. The principal aim of the Fellow’s work is to foster good writing practice across all disciplines and media.

Any questions?

Please contact us at: iad.researchers@ed.ac.uk