Book an appointment with a Royal Literary Fellow and get help with your academic writing

The Academic Skills Centre has two Royal Literary Fund Fellows working with us as writing tutors to help you to strengthen your academic writing through our free, confidential appointment service.

Our tutors work with the University through the UK-wide RLF Fellowship programme. 

A Royal Literary Fund Writing Fellow is a professional, published author whose role as a writing tutor is to help any student or staff member, at any level, to strengthen their writing. We are fortunate to have two Fellows working with us as academic writing tutors: Peter Arnott and Garry MacKenzie.

The writing tutors will help you to:

• develop your academic writing technique and style to better write essays, reports, theses, dissertations, book chapters, etc.
• focus your reading for essay, dissertation, paper or thesis writing
• express your ideas more clearly
• improve your grammar and punctuation
• discover reading to improve your writing and editing skills

They will not:

• offer discipline-specific guidance
• comment on the marking scheme used in your discipline
• undertake English language tuition if English is not your first language
• edit or proofread your assignments

Guide on Proofreading

Living outside of the UK

Due to the charitable status of the Royal Literary Fund, its Academic Writing Fellows are only permitted to work with University of Dundee students who are currently living in the UK. If you currently live outside the UK, please make an academic skills appointment and one of our tutors will be happy to support you with your writing.

Book a writing tutor appointment

Appointments are 50 minutes, available during Semesters 1 and 2

• Choose your preferred day then contact the appropriate writing tutor directly from your University of Dundee email address (emails from personal accounts might go into junk folders and be missed).
  • Monday and Tuesday - email: Garry MacKenzie
  • Wednesday in-person (on-campus) and Thursday (online) - email: Peter Arnott
• Provide details of areas of your writing you would like advice with. Look at any previous feedback you’ve received from your subject tutors to help you with this.
• The tutor will contact you to arrange a suitable time for your appointment.
• The writing tutor will include a link to the RLF Calendy booking system for you to select an online or on-campus option and a day and time for your appointment.

About our RLF writing tutors

Peter Arnott

Peter Arnott is one of Scotland's best-known playwrights, with many award-winning professional productions of his work starting in 1985 and extending into the present day, both in Scotland and further afield. He has teaching experience at the Universities of Glasgow and Edinburgh and has held workshops elsewhere in the world. He has mentored many new writers for the Playwrights' Studio, Scotland among others. He hopes to bring a playwright's awareness of an audience to his support of academic student writing in Dundee.

Read Peter Arnott's full bio

Garry MacKenzie

Garry MacKenzie is a writer living in Fife. He is the author of the non-fiction book Scotland: A Literary Guide for Travellers (Bloomsbury / I.B. Tauris, 2016) and the poetry collections Ben Dorain: a conversation with a mountain (The Irish Pages Press, 2021) and ring-net (Clutag Press, 2023). Ben Dorain was shortlisted for a Scottish National Book Award and longlisted for the Highland Book Prize. He teaches literature and creative writing in a variety of community and adult-education contexts.

Read Garry MacKenzie's full bio

Find out more about the Fellowship Scheme

Resources

• RLF online resources