From dread to ready for your panel.
A 12-week group course for doctoral researchers facing the upgrade or confirmation report. Teaching, feedback, and a small group to help you move it forward. Researchers writing in a second language especially welcome.
The report nobody taught you to write.
You’re staring at a blank page, and the deadline keeps creeping closer.
Your supervisor says it ‘needs work’ – but not what work, or how to do it.
The panel’s coming, and you’re honestly not sure what they’re looking for.
No one ever showed you how an upgrade report is meant to come together. Why would they?
Plan it. Draft it. Walk in ready.
Plan
Get clear on your research question, your contribution, and what the document actually needs to do.
Draft
Build your literature and methods sections – writing worked on live in the room, plus feedback on your own extracts.
Panel-ready
Polish, self-edit, and rehearse – so you walk into the panel knowing your work holds up.
What you’re signing up to think about.
Writing breaks over Christmas and February half-term, so the term holidays stay yours.
Your English isn’t the problem.
The upgrade report is a genre nobody explains – where the argument goes, how a sentence carries its weight, what a panel expects to see on the page. That’s a craft you can learn, and it’s exactly what we work on.
What that looks like
Clear, teachable structure. The phrasing panels expect. Feedback on your own writing that shows you the patterns.
“
My writing level improved a lot since I was working with her. Lizzy is an invaluable resource for PhD candidates.
– Dr Alaa Aladnani, University of Leicester & King Abdulaziz University
Dr Lizzy Tanguay
SFHEA · ILM-qualified coach · PhD in applied linguistics
I’ve spent twenty years teaching writing in higher education – sixteen of them at Swansea University, where I led postgraduate research-writing programmes for the Centre for Academic Success. I’ve a PhD in applied linguistics, and I’ve long specialised in helping researchers who write in a second language. I also spent far too long stuck on my own thesis before I worked out how academic writing actually works, so now I teach what I wish someone had taught me.
– Lizzy
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