We’re excited to announce that we’re launching our first writing group! It’ll be free throughout July as we gather feedback, and it’ll move to a subscription service in August charged at an affordable rate. If you’d like to sign up for July or to receive alerts for future groups, you can do so here.
Both of us have benefitted tremendously from writing groups as we finished our PhDs, so this group is targeted towards grad students who are in the writing stage.
The group will be organized around silent sociability, a concept that effectively summarizes our ethos. The idea is that just by being together and struggling with writing, we’re creating a supportive environment that counteracts some of the isolation and pressure of the graduate student writing experience.
That said, there’s no ideal way to structure a writing group. But, aside from the unsurprising fact that, according to the fledgling academic literature on writing groups, folks in writing groups most appreciate the uninterrupted writing time, there are also three other key elements, all of which we’ll incorporate into our writing groups: (1) peer interaction, (2) formal instruction, (3) a focus on emotions and mental health. We’ll adjust the balance between these over time, depending on the group’s needs.
Of course, writing groups are all based on the assumption that we all need uninterrupted writing time. And, by starting to run writing groups, we’re here to make getting this uninterrupted writing time as easy for you to get as possible. Here’s what you’ll get:
- We’ll provide you with a weekly online space full of friendly strangers that will help you to get your writing done.
- The schedule determines the writing blocks, so it’s out of your hands! We take on the responsibility of starting and ending the blocks. No need to motivate yourself!
- To complement these blocks of uninterrupted writing time, we’ll have breaks where we’ll get to chat informally as peers about our struggles and successes.
- We’ll have a discussion at the end of each block where we’ll also offer you a bit of formal instruction on topics that you’ve requested and on elements of academic writing in which we specialize, such as goal-setting, structural and copy editing, and on strategies for organizing your research.
Our approach to these groups is informed not only by our own experience in a variety of grad student writing groups during our PhDs, but also by the fledgling academic literature on writing groups, their mechanisms, their benefits, and on how to refine them. We’d be happy to share what we have learned both practically and theoretically—and you can see three key sources below if you want to dive in by yourself.
Finally, research shows that many of the barriers to writing for grad students come from emotional struggles. A writing group is not therapy, but we welcome discussion of the heavy toll that graduate writing can sometimes take. We’ll structure our discussions around this ever-present challenge if there’s need for it.
We hope this gives you a basic sense of what to expect from our writing groups. Again, if you’re interested, feel free to sign up for alerts here.
Further Reading:
Fegan, S. (2016). When shutting up brings us together: Several affordances of a scholarly writing group. Journal of Academic Language and Learning, 10(2), A20-A31.
Vacek, K., Donohue, W. J., Gates, A., Lee, A. S. J., & Simpson, S. (2021). Seeking balance within personal writing ecologies: a collaborative autoethnography of a doctoral student writing group. Studies in Continuing Education, 43(1), 104-118.
Wardale, D., Hendrickson, T., Jefferson, T., Klass, D., Lord, L., & Marinelli, M. (2015). Creating an oasis: some insights into the practice and theory of a successful academic writing group. Higher Education Research & Development, 34(6), 1297-1310.