In Process: Advice Column

Writing Groups

by Leah Sneider

Congratulations on your acceptance into a graduate program!  You’ve gone through a series of hoops to get here but your jumping is far from over.  In order to survive through that last brutal hoop, the dissertation, I suggest that graduate students, either in coursework or ABD, start or join an interdisciplinary writing group as soon as possible.  Doing so will help with every hoop along the way.

Graduate students experience a great amount of pressure and isolation with often minimal guidance in navigating the daunting challenge of developing a research question and book-length response, inducing the almost 50% drop out rate and high rates of depression and anxiety amongst graduate students.  Most graduate students who drop out do so at the dissertation writing stage for various reasons.  Having worked with many students in this stage, I understand that they contemplate dropping out because of the intense isolation combined with the feelings of unpreparedness and lack of confidence.  However, when these same students discuss their feelings and frustrations with the writing process with fellow students, they are more likely to feel a sense of relief, a surge of confidence, and the motivation to finish.  There are many more reasons to start or join a writing group.  Here are some of them:

Environmental/emotional aspects

  1. No competition within discipline, supportive without political repercussions
  2. Stakes are lower, both intellectual and emotional, because each member is the expert in the room
  3. Accountability: forces each other to do/think/say something
  4. Relieves each members’ brain from their own studies, which opens them up to new possibilities for their own work
  5. Helps to maintain intellectual stimulation about one’s work

Rhetorical benefits

  1. Exposes members to various applications/practices of similar theoretical or methodological approaches that enriches one’s own work
  2. Forces students to talk about and understand their rhetorical situation and processes, not to mention their argument as a whole
  3. Provides examples of how one writes or can write in terms of style as well as discipline-specific standards as it relates to content/discipline
  4. Offers opportunity for interesting rhetorical problem solving (ex. approaching a particular chapter, genre, or complex idea)
  5. Offers an audience that requires more information, different language, etc.; practical for teaching and publishing their scholarship to a diverse audience; provides a mirror audience to reflect thoughts/ideas/argument (mirror audience: the audience repeats back the author’s ideas so that the author can assess clarity and accuracy in their work)

Writing benefits

  1.  Helps students bend their knowledge in interesting ways, making them much more interdisciplinary-savvy
  2. Offers new ideas to help develop and identify interesting points/interventions
  3. Since students often share similar problems, they can begin to see in others’ work what they need to work on in their own work (ex. Rhetorical stance, asserting one’s argument)

Professional benefits and development

  1. Practice the skills necessary to mentor and advise large projects
  2. Prepares students planning to work outside of academia for conversing across experiences and knowledge
  3. Practice teaching/talking about their projects/research in preparation for going on the job market.
  4. d. Intellectual and professional networking across disciplines

Different types of groups

Peer review groups involve sharing drafts with members in order to solicit feedback, typically about a particular aspect of concern for the author.  Authors will indicate what aspects they want readers to focus on but readers are free to comment on anything they deem important.  The focus of these conversations is on higher order concerns such as development, analysis, organization, and thesis.  Grammar and other editing concerns should be only a minimal part of the conversation if at all.

Support groups meet to discuss their goals, challenges, and successes throughout the process.  Every session each member will discuss their progress since the previous session, seek advice, and announce their goals for the next session.  Besides developing camaraderie, support groups help members to make smaller, more achievable goals between sessions.

Mixed groups combine peer review with support groups, especially in terms of developing goals between sessions.

How to start a writing group

I would suggest that you begin by seeking others outside of your own discipline but who share similar methodologies and would be interested in joining a group.  You can post flyers around departments or on listservs, attend graduate student organization meetings, or check with your tutoring/writing center to see if they can help organize groups.

Organize an initial meeting where members can get to know each other and determine a few logistical aspects of the group:

  1. What are your individual and group goals?
  2. What is the general nature of the group (support, peer review, or a mix of both)?
  3. Will you have a facilitator (writing center tutor, faculty member, other)? If not, who will be in charge of organizing the group or will these duties alternate amongst group members?
  4. How often will you meet and for how long? Where will you meet?
  5. How will you exchange written work and how and when will members need to provide comments?