Graduate Student Services

Graduate-level academic writing projects can be complex, long-term, and stressful. In our graduate facing programs, we build networks of support around graduate students to help them succeed in their writing, thrive in their programs, and achieve success in professional development and social/emotional well-being. 

Our graduate student services aim to holistically support graduate students – both as students and as future professionals – as they engage in the multi-year process of socialization and identity development in their disciplines. Writing is a critical site for graduate students’ “disciplinary becoming” (Curry 2016). Thus, we support grad students not only through the texts they produce, but in the larger and often messier process of developing their scholarly selves both on and off the page. 

Services Overview

The Writing Hub offers a diverse suite of services for graduate writers. Depending on their needs, graduate students seeking resources in the Writing Hub can choose to engage in one-on-one or group-based formats, on particular writing genres or on broadly transferable topics of academic writing, through a one-time interaction or an ongoing program. We offer several potential entry points for any graduate student seeking support, which can then open the door for more comprehensive support as the student advances through their program and career. 

Though we offer a variety of different programs, they share several features in common: 

• All programs are facilitated by peer Graduate Writing Consultants. 
• All programs aim to create a welcoming and positive atmosphere for writing.
• All programs aim to identify and make explicit the tacit knowledge of academic discourse. 
• All programs aim to develop students' familiarity with and practice of tangible writing strategies. 
• All programs aim to provide empathetic, affective support to graduate writers.

Our Approach to Working with Graduate Students

We base our approach to graduate student writing support on seven key foundations: 

• Graduate students are in the process of “disciplinary becoming” - a long-term social process of learning the boundaries of legitimate discourse in their disciplines and internalizing the norms and practices of their research cultures. As a result, graduate students must engage with texts and genres as instantiations of academic social practice, and be supported in navigating  conventions of scholarly discourse when authoring their own texts (Curry 2016).

• Because academic discourse is both a social/institutional practice and a set of linguistic constraints, graduate students from a variety of social and linguistic backgrounds will struggle to learn how to write “correctly” in their fields (Casanave and Li 2008). Multilingual students new to writing in professional American academic English will likely feel this struggle acutely (Canagarajah 1993; Cox 2018). Whether working with a monolingual English writer, or a multilingual writer, we prioritize that strong and clear writing entails much more than “correct” grammar, and that this particular category of English language entails several cultural constraints and conventions.

• The discursive practices of disciplinary research communication, having been internalized through years of academic socialization, can easily be rendered invisible and/or obvious to senior members of a discipline. As a result, graduate student newcomers generally learn this knowledge tacitly, and often through multiple failed attempts. Graduate students benefit from engaging in ongoing mentored conversations and participation experiences to develop their disciplinary discourse knowledge (Starke-Meyerring 2011).

• Many faculty advisors find giving feedback to graduate writers challenging. Likewise, many graduate students struggle in seeking and understanding advisor feedback on their work. These challenges are amplified when disiciplinary discourse conventions are left implied and/or when there are not ample opportunities for mentored conversations around writing due to department and/or resource constraints. As a result, graduate students and advisors can benefit from programs that support their mutual learning of fundamental rhetorical principles that are at work in academic writing (Paré 2011).

• The academic writing process occurs throughout the research process, not merely at the end of data collection and analysis.The notion that one merely “writes up” their research collapses academic writing into a deceptively straightforward act of reporting, rather than the complex thinking, sense-making, and persuading task that it actually is (Kamler and Thomson 2006). As a result, graduate students benefit from regular engagement in writing and thinking throughout their research projects. 

• The long process of disciplinary becoming can entail years of considerable, if hidden, struggle (Starke-Meyerring 2011). To support graduate students in their writing also means supporting them in that long, often messy, and sometimes isolating process. Graduate student writing support thus sits at the intersection of academic support (student success), professional development, and social/emotional well-being (Gray 2018). As a result, graduate writing support programs must also incorporate empathetic, affective support for students who may be struggling with overwhelm, confusion, loneliness/isolation, and institutional exclusion. 

• Graduate education programs, particularly those at the doctoral level, are crucial sites for diversifying institutions of higher education. The paradox of writing in graduate education ー that writing is a crucial skill for “making it” in the academy but rarely instructed explicitly ー can disproportionately advantage graduate students who possess the cultural capital privileged by the institution, and leave those without such resources vulnerable to imposter syndrome, isolation, and overwhelm. This dynamic can, inadvertently, play out at the individual level of mentoring and advising, especially when disciplinary discourse practices are left implied. Differentiated mentorship practices, outside the hierarchical advisor/student dyad, can be a mechanism for achieving greater inclusion for graduate students (Okawa 2002).  As a result, we see our peer-facilitated programs as an opportunity to develop supportive “horizontal-mentoring” that de-centers institutional authority and instead centers students’ experiences and self-directed learning (VanHaitsma and Ceraso 2017). 

References

Canagarajah, A.S. (1993). Comments on Ann Raimes’s “Out of the Woods: Emerging Traditions in the Teaching of Writing.” TESOL Quarterly, 27(2), 301-306.

Cox, M. (2018). “Noticing” Language in the Writing Center: Preparing Writing Center Tutors to Support Graduate Multilingual Writers. In S. Lawrence and T. Myers Zawacki (Eds.), Re/Writing the Center: Approaches to Supporting Graduate Students in the Writing Center. Louisville, CO: Utah State University Press.

Curry, M.J. (2016). More than Language: Graduate Student Writing as “Disciplinary Becoming.” In S. Simpson, N.A. Caplan, M. Cox, and T. Phillips (Eds.), Supporting Graduate Student Writers: Research, Curriculum, & Program Design. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. 

Gray, M. (2018). More than Dissertation Support: Aligning Our Programs with Doctoral Students’ Well-Being and Professional Development Needs. In S. Lawrence and T. Myers Zawacki (Eds.), Re/Writing the Center: Approaches to Supporting Graduate Students in the Writing Center. Louisville, CO: Utah State University Press.

Kamler, B. and Thomson, P. (2006). Helping Doctoral Students Write: Pedagogies for Supervision. London: Routledge. 

Okawa, G. Y. (2002). Diving for pearls : Mentoring as cultural and activist practice among academics of color. College Composition and Communication, 53(3), 507–532.

Paré, A. (2011). Speaking of Writing: Supervisory Feedback and the Dissertation. In L. McAlpine and C. Amundsen (Eds.), Doctoral Education: Research-Based Strategies for Doctoral Students, Supervisors, and Administrators. New York: Springer.

Starke-Meyerring, D. (2011). The Paradox of Writing in Doctoral Education: Student Experiences. In L. McAlpine and C. Amundsen (Eds.), Doctoral Education: Research-Based Strategies for Doctoral Students, Supervisors, and Administrators. New York: Springer.

VanHaitsma, P., and Ceraso, S. (2017). “Making it” in the academy through horizontal mentoring. Peitho Journal, 19(2), 210-233.