Advice for Writing NCPTW Proposals

NCPTW is often attendees’ first academic conference, which is the main reason this conference is exciting and important for the writing center community. If you’ve never written a conference proposal before, here are some things to think about:

 

• Choose a presentation type that best fits your goals as a presenter and the content you plan to address.
• Topics should be fresh! Choosing a topic that excites an audience and offers them a new way to think about their work as tutors is important.
• How do you plan to explore this topic? Explain the methods that you’ve used to answer the questions you have about your topic.
• Provide evidence to support your claims! Evidence comes in many different forms–statistics, survey results, interview and focus group responses, library research, etc. It’s up to you to use evidence that best answers your questions.
• Audience awareness–proposal writers will want think about the best ways to intrigue the NCPTW audience, which is made up of tutors and professionals interested in the practices of peer tutors in writing.
• Get feedback! Go to the writing center, and test drive your proposal with your peers.  Sharing your proposal will only make it stronger. If your readers have questions about aspects of the proposal, it’s likely that they review team will have similar questions.

 

Given all of the above, a strong NCPTW conference proposal will bring together topic, format, method, and evidence in a way that speaks to and excites a peer tutor audience.