Students seem to encounter various challenges when writing bachelor's and master's theses, indicating a need to support them in their writing processes. In this study, academic writing workshops for students writing bachelor's and master's theses were developed and investigated during three years of a participatory action research project. The…

Previous research has suggested that bachelor's and master's students seem to experience challenges with thesis writing, and the need for support might be greater when studying at a distance. To further develop supportive practices for thesis writing, this study points to a need to acknowledge materialities and spaces as active and necessary…

This article seeks to answer two questions: what kinds of expertise are needed to lead an effective dissertation boot camp; and how can those outside the graduate student's discipline support their writing? Drawing on four years of application data and post-camp interviews, I reveal how writing process knowledge--similar to that described in the…

This article describes the effects of sequential non-residential writing retreats on graduate students the development of sustainable writing practices in the latter stages of writing theses and dissertations. Our study looks to understand how graduate students implement techniques of academic writing productivity. We collected data from three…

Seeking to support graduate student writers, writing centers at research universities have developed highly successful dissertation camps over the past 15 years. Previous research from North American dissertation camps has demonstrated significant benefits from these camps, as dissertation writers developed new writing habits and increased their…

Over the past few decades, the number of people enrolled in doctoral study has increased dramatically across the world. In practical terms, this has meant that universities now receive increasingly diverse students with regard to ethnicity, age, language, culture, and background preparedness for higher degree study. Students can, and often do,…

At the university level, writing groups have shown to be useful to teach and learn research writing as well as to advance academic-scientific publication and to discover collaboration opportunities among members from different disciplinary fields. At the same time, peer review, an important practice in the academic sphere, is learned within the…

Writing retreats are structured events during which a group of people write in the same room over several days. In this paper, we report on findings from a study exploring the impact of writing retreats on PhD students' writing and their sense of self as academic writers. A second aim of the study was to contribute to the search for appropriate…

Despite extensive attention to peer review in composition studies literature, the activity remains challenging to design, in part because there are multiple potential goals for peer review. This article draws on existing literature to describe a variety of peer review goals and then presents interview data to illustrate the perceptions of…

This article argues that teaching writing can help graduate students become better writers. Each year, more than 100 graduate students from more than thirty departments participate in one of two training courses offered through Cornell's John S. Knight Institute for Writing in the Disciplines. This article describes some of how these courses…

Writing is recognized as a vital skill in education and the workplace; students in the United States finishing K-12 schooling are expected to be competent writers. Yet, "the Nation's Report Card" found that U.S. high school graduates coming into the workforce are particularly deficient in writing skills. Teachers serve as a crucial link…

What happens when international doctoral students participate in a creative writing workshop? Very often, students at our large midwestern U.S. university enter classes having learned English in their native countries with a heavy emphasis on only skills and grammar. They have not had the chance to play with language, to express themselves through…