PPLS Skills Centre
A decade of writing advice
Since 2016, I have been the coordinator of the PPLS Skills Centre, a writing centre run by the School of Philosophy, Psychology & Language Sciences at the University of Edinburgh. We’ve delivered over 15,000 one-on-one writing appointments in that time. Student response has been overwhelmingly positive:
“single-handedly saving my academic career”
“one of the most useful things I’ve done since starting at the university”
“genuinely a highlight of my time in Psychology”
“a real credit to the school of PPLS […] my friends studying other subjects are really jealous of this resource we have available to us”
“the single most useful session in my entire experience of the MSc”
Because nearly all of our resources can be accessed only by members of the University of Edinburgh, I’ve decided to document what it is we do on this page. I hope that these resources are of use to university students and staff working on academic writing, but also to anyone looking to establish their own tutor centre.
It’s clear that academic writing is in a state of flux; nobody knows where we’re going at this point. That’s why it seems essential to create a snapshot now (March 2026). Maybe years from now this will help someone answer the question of how people worked on academic writing before the rise of LLMs.
1. Student guidance (SharePoint archive)
Our internal site serves two main purposes: (1) helping students book time with our PhD tutors and (2) helping academics learn how to write, study, and conduct research. In it, I…
- describe the purpose and structure of appointments, discuss eligibility constraints, and spell out the logistics of booking,
- provide detailed writing guidance that frames essays not as tests but as acts of communication, giving specific, actionable advice that is explicitly mapped to different approaches in our subject areas,
- help students treat their studying as an operational challenge by providing them with tools to manage their time with varying granularity, learn more effectively, and prepare for exams in a principled way,
- show academics how to conduct research by engaging with sources, writing literature reviews, and utilising the technical resources and training at their disposal,
- make classroom interactions work better by providing guidance to teaching staff on good practice while providing tips to students on how to make the most of in-class discussions, and
- assist students in transitioning to the professional world by showing them how to articulate skills learned in their degrees to their employers.
2. Tutor manual
Like our site, this manual also has two purposes: (1) articulating our core belief that writing is an act of communication and (2) providing a detailed operations guide for autonomous tutors. In it, I…
- define the tutor’s role as coach, outlining hard and soft guidelines for sessions with helpful prompts and questions,
- provide detailed explanations of the centre’s rules and their motivations, and
- outline a comprehensive training pipeline that moves tutors through their careers at the centre.
Coming soon: Data infrastructure
Over the next few months (March-June 2026), I will be sharing some of our automated data infrastructure on GitHub. We ingest data from a variety of sources with Python (pandas) to feed a central PostgreSQL database with extensible architecture. The system handles large amounts of unstructured data, tidying and sanitising it for longitudinal analysis, workload equity auditing, and the production of actionable insights for the centre and for teaching staff more broadly in our department.