There is no question that writing can be difficult, but for a doctoral student—for one who has never written a dissertation—writing can suddenly be completely overwhelming. It can remain overwhelming. The process can be so daunting, in fact, that some students never make it out of the candidacy stage. They get stuck at the dissertation because they do not know how to write one.
The very best graduate student—the best writer—may write well, but may not know how to structure a dissertation, how to get started, how to stop writing, or what to do if s/he gets stuck in the process. The very best advisers can offer sound advice about content, but most do not have the time (or the inclination) to offer advice about writing.
The dissertation writer has to be the one to get the work done, and this is where the dissertation writing group can be the most beneficial to the student. The group can support the writer, the process, and the product.
At ProfHacker, we believe in writing groups, how their structure and their accountability can help a writer remain focused in order to complete a writing task. We’ve written before about forming writing online groups and writing groups for new faculty. Today, we are writing about forming writing groups in your university’s writing center for dissertation writers. (*)
Many university graduate schools offer group assistance to graduate students who are writing theses or dissertations, as do some academic departments, or even mental health clinics on campuses. These groups can present important topics: time management, goal setting, adopting the persona of a professional (instead of a student), or working through the emotional and psychological stresses of dissertation writing. Many of them, however, never address the nuts-and-bolts issues of writing. The university’s writing center might be a good place to house such writing groups, as writing centers (and their professional consultants) are all about writing.
The model could be quite simple:
- The Facilitator: Writing consultants in writing centers are trained professionals, many of whom have written and defended their own dissertations. They know the process. They know writing. Writing consultants make wonderful resources for graduate students. The facilitator is not an adviser and does not evaluate writers or their writing, but is instead a coach, a guide to the writing process. The facilitator can provide “homework” if a writer is stuck in some aspect of writing, conduct mini-lessons/presentations to the group about writing-related issues, and is a collegial presence in a time of high-stress and anxiety for graduate students.
- The Writing Group: For optimum benefit to the writers, writing groups can range from 4 to 10 participants who are from the either the same discipline or from multiple disciplines. (There are benefits to each model.) Graduate student participants would make a commitment to their writing group—one semester or one year, for example—to meet periodically to discuss their writing progress/process. Some of the logistical details are changeable in writing groups and not all groups must work the same way. For example, how often the group meets, how long they meet, or what each meeting would cover can change depending on the group. Groups can make their own rules.
Conducting a writing group in a writing center sounds easy and it can make logistical sense, but certainly there are concerns about this model. Who would pay for the facilitator’s time? Or, who would enforce the writers’ commitment to the group? These and other questions could be handled on a university-by-university or even group-by-group basis. It does seem, however, that the benefits to students completing their dissertations, to the writing center, and to the entire university outweigh the potential costs that might arise from the implementation of such groups.
How about you? How could a writing group in your university’s writing center benefit your students? What kinds of challenges might you face with this model? If you have implemented such a model at your institution, how did you overcome some of the challenges? Please leave your comments and suggestions below.
(* The Caveat): This post is intentionally general, as we cannot know the structure, the strengths, or the limitations of every university’s writing center in this country (and beyond). Please take some suggestions if they are useful to you, but also, if your situation is unique, provide some suggestions in comments about how this idea can be tweaked for your institutional use. You can privately make specific what is generalized here.
[Image by RalphBijker and used under the Creative Commons license.]
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8 Responses to Starting a Dissertation Writing Group (In a Writing Center)
karenjcannon - July 27, 2010 at 10:03 am
As a doctoral candidate working on the dissertation at this very time, I can tell you I’d welcome a writing group with open arms! However, one challenge I find in my department (and one which I suspect is not unique) is my fellow doctoral students saying that either a) they are too busy for yet another “meeting” to put on their calendar, and/or b) they don’t study/write/work well in group situations. I suspect that these are excuses, for which I do not fault them because we all have excuses from time to time. But I do think that a writing group would be helpful for us.I also often think that these excuses (or reasons, if you prefer to call them) come because my fellow doc students and I are working on different timelines (some are defending proposals, while others are working on conceptualizing their ideas, and yet others are writing up their results and conclusions). Our department is relatively small in the number of doctoral students we have at any given time – an entering class can have anywhere from 1 to 7 or 8 entering each fall – so we can struggle a little bit in terms of having a cohort that progresses at the same pace.Any thoughts or recommendations about reasoning away the excuses above? Of course, if one truly is not interested in a writing group, I’m not suggesting forceful involvement! But sometimes it helps to reason past the surface excuses…
11248633 - July 27, 2010 at 11:01 am
I’m not part of a dissertation workshop at the writing center (it’s not an option here), but I’d like to mention my experience with the two other formats mentioned–they work quite well to suppliment each other.First, I particiate in a Dissertation Workshop offered in my department. For this twice-montly meeting, grad students submit a chapter draft to peers for feedback. We meet for about two hours in a group (low turnout is about four people, average about eight, high about twelve). It’s been super-useful, both as a deadline for those submitting, examples for those at various writing stages, and for a sense of community.I’m also part of a weekly dissertation support group at the Student Health Center. This is open to any graduate student in Arts and Sciences (for those who are in small departments and might not have enough folks for a writing cohort within the department, this offers a solution). It’s composed of about eight people at various ABD stages and facilitated by one of the mental health counselors. People can join the group for a flexible amount of time (Some join just to get past a troublesome spot and continue on their own after–others remain in the group until they finish. And our completion rate is close to 100%).Here’s the structure. We start by checking in, rating our satisfaction level with our progress from 0-10 (and each member has had days within the entire spectrum) and the reasons behind it. We then discuss any shared theme (procrastination, trouble with advisors, balancing dissertation and teaching demands, etc). Then we set goals for the following week–often dissertation writing goals and self-care goals, which helps us from getting too burned out. Those goals become the basis for our next numerical rating the following week. Thus, folks who have been stuck for a long time can set small, resonable goals for getting unstuck. Later, they pick up momentum. It doesn’t really matter that we’re in various fields (we can gloss over the terminology that we don’t share). Our goals may be focused on time (I’ll spend two hours writing on weekdays; I’ll have a total of six hours doing research on X). Or they may be specific (I’ll have an outline for Chapter 3 by next week). When my writing was most difficult, one of the few effective motivations was thinking to myself, “I’ll have tell the group what I got done tomorrow, so I better start/finish this…”I appreciate both forums. And I’d consider using a workshop facilitated by the Writing Cneter. Anything that keeps my productive and positive is useful.
cleverclogs - July 27, 2010 at 3:58 pm
I am in a diss writing group which functions much like the Writing Group described in the article, but it was started by a fellow student. It is not facilitated by our writing center for various reasons. One reason is that scheduling is a nightmare already and having to confine ourselves to the times that the writing center is open would make scheduling meetings twice as difficult. Another reason is that because our writing center is aimed at helping undergrads, it is largely staffed by fellow grad students (I’m in English) who are actually behind us in the program and have even less diss experience than we do. Thus, it’t not entirely useful for grad students.@karenjcannon (#1) – of course, you don’t want to find yourself in a writing group with people who don’t want to be there! But in regard to the “excuses” you list above, I’d reason them away this way:Excuse A: “Yes, we’re all super-busy. But we don’t have to meet more than a couple of times a month for a couple of hours. 4 Hours / month total. And really, isn’t everyone’s main goal to finish this damn thing and move on?”Excuse B: “You don’t have to write “in” the group. You can bring your writing *to* the group. Better to get feedback and questions now than in a job talk. And if you don’t work well in group situations, this is the perfect opportunity to get better at that skill since it will be necessary to show that you can when you are trying to get hired.”
billiehara - July 27, 2010 at 5:11 pm
What great comments, everyone!@karenjcannon I completely understand your problem/concern with your cohort size. When the group is small, and, as you say, working at different paces, it’s hard to form a writing group. That’s one of the benefits of forming the group through a separate office. Or, forming a group outside the university. You can group yourself with others who are dissertating. They don’t have to be in your discipline or even in your state. ;-)When I was writing my dissertation, I was not in a place to be a part of any writing group (through my place of employment, a university, or my Ph.D.program, a different university). So I started “Dissertation Bootcamp,” an online writing group. It functioned much the same way as a face-to-face group might work.However, @cleverclogs seems to have some excellent ideas about how to handle those “excuses!”@cleverclogs, you mention that professional writing consultants are not an option in your writing center. That’s one of the drawbacks of this kind of model, but can the center’s director facilitate these groups? (I’m assuming that this person is not a student.) It does seem, though, that you have found the “work around” for that problem. There are so many variables in the kinds of groups that we can devise; I’m glad that you found a solution that works for you.@11248633 Thanks for the info about the types of groups at your university. I’ve always wondered about those groups that come from Health Services. :-) What this conversation leads me to believe even more strongly is that there are so many different types of dissertation writers, different institutions, different ways of getting things done…. that there isn’t a one-size-fits all model that will work for everyone. I’m glad that we have this space to talk about all the different ways that work.Keep those comments coming, people! I know there are dissertation writers reading this post and they have questions. Bring ‘em on!
cleverclogs - July 28, 2010 at 8:27 am
@ billiehara – I imagine the center’s director could facilitate a group, and actually, I think our program director (different person) has a group going for other students at the diss stage. But honestly, the writing center is swamped and so is the director, whom we all know and like and don’t want to make hassles for. My situation is also a bit unique, I think, because I am part of a good size cohort in my subfield who are pretty serious about the work and, mysteriously, are not hyper-competitive. That’s a lot of support already, and many of us work with the same advisors. We tend to share feedback about the process from those advisors. So I guess there is a part of us that feels 1) it would be unfair to overburden the writing center’s director when we’re doing just fine and 2) that we prefer to get subfield-specific feedback.I will say that I look forward to going to my diss group – it helps mitigate what is for me a pretty lonely process.
mrhammond - July 28, 2010 at 1:29 pm
We’ve seen a lot of these same symptoms of loneliness at my institution, where I started as a grad student and now work as staff. This year, we followed the model of a few other schools (Stanford, Princeton, Penn, among others) to start a dissertation “boot camp” as a week-long support group for writers. (Though we redubbed them “Write-Ins” to capture more of our campus culture – think more protest than militaristic training.) We’ve had great success with these so far, and look forward to many more. They’re basically a 5-day camp where writers commit to working for 4 hours/day, and put down a deposit to say they’ll do it, in exchange for free snacks/caffeine throughout the session and lunch at the end of each day’s work. Writers can continue into the afternoon if they’d like, or they can take a well-deserved break (to go to the gym or get housework done, for example, which might otherwise be seen as procrastination techniques but really shouldn’t be neglected in an ideal world!). If they make it through the full week, all 4 hours/day, they get their deposit back. If not, our office uses it towards the costs of the program.(More info here: http://grad-affairs.uchicago.edu/services/disscamp.shtml)Many of the participants in these sessions have continued the work on their own with a listserv and setting up time in the library to keep working, while other students who didn’t participate have created their own version with in a department. In the latter cases, they all pitch in a “deposit” which is used as a rewards fund at the end of the week. Either way, these are short-term bursts of activity that can (hopefully) spur on a good stretch of productivity. We’ve already seen some participants graduate and others earn write-up fellowships for their efforts, so that’s been really rewarding. My office isn’t a writing center, nor it is the counseling center, which runs its own support groups for dissertation writers. I think there’s room on any campus for multiple kinds of support. I just love running the Write-Ins! Hope that helps someone!
dld18 - July 29, 2010 at 9:00 pm
The idea of a writing group never arose during my doctoral program but I was fortunate to have two peers who, separately, shared their successes and “failures” with me as I was able to share with them. This support was essential to my completion, focused mostly on listening to and critiquing thoughts about where we each were in our research and writing process.I am a very recent graduate and don’t have much “data” to support this, but from my observations, the students in my program who have struggled the most are the ones who have been (either intentionally or accidentally) isolated from others who are in the dissertation stage. Find support: a peer, a faculty mmeber (your advisor or otherwise), a recent graduate. Talk about your writing and your process whenever you have the chance. I was struck by amazing ideas at the most surprising times (in line at the snack bar, in walking between locations on campus, on the phone when talking about my assistantship, etc.) The more you talk, think, and explore, the more likely you will be engaged in your topic (even if you are so tired of it, you want to switch!).If you can, take the time to form a writing group and counter the excuses:Excuse 1-I don’t have time. Life is about balance. You can make your dissertation and your degree completion a priority by giving it one hour a week. (I agree that four hours is better, but start small :-)Excuse 2-I don’t work well in groups. Think about when groups *have* been successful, and set up ground rules/expectations that strive for that sort of group interaction. You can always make a group “guilt-free drop out.” Ask prospective members to give it three meetings. (Or two, if you prefer.) If the time has not been worth those two meetings, then they can drop out, no questions asked, no guilt.Even if you can’t get a group going, find the support that works for you! I am happy to be available to talk through challenges! Denisedenised@bgsu.edu
cmgolde - July 30, 2010 at 3:53 pm
At Stanford we (the Office of the Vice Provost for Graduate Education) have found the Writing Center to be a terrific collabotor. They run Dissertation Boot Camps several times a year (http://www.stanford.edu/dept/undergrad/pwr/hwc/graduates/bootcamp.html) and our office provides the financial support to cover the expenses. They also sponsor workshops on a regular basis: one of which is on “Establishing an Effective Dissertation Writing Group.” I co-facilitate that workshop, which has spawned several groups. We also have a “DWG Starter Kit” available as a PDF. http://vpge.stanford.edu/docs/DWG_starter_kit.pdf