Assistantship Opportunities Now Available

The GWC takes a lot of pride in the work that we do and the resources we provide for our students. Our team is a collaborative one that values a wide range of experiences and knowledge, and we are looking for a few new consultants to join our team for the 2021-2022 academic year.  If you’re a PhD student, preferably past coursework, you are invited to apply for one of these 6 or 10 hour assistantships.

If interested, please read the full description position below and email Becca Cassady including a writing sample, C.V., and letter of reference from your Graduate Program Director, PI, or supervising faculty.

______________________________________

Job Description             

Graduate Writing Consultants help graduate students with any writing project at any stage of the composition process—generating ideas, organizing, revising, etc. Their primary work is to hold one-on-one conferences with graduate students regarding their writing. (They will not proofread papers for students.) Additionally, consultants design presentations and conduct writing workshops and research current trends in composition scholarship to find useful tools for working with graduate students. 6 hour per week and 10 hour per week assistantships available.

Benefits of being a Consultant include

  • Interdisciplinary experience
  • Regular contact with academic writing and writing across the disciplines
  • Ongoing professional development in writing pedagogy
  • Inclusion in conversations related to the needs of Baylor graduate students
  • Paid training and opportunities to work during the summer terms
  • Diversify your CV

Former Graduate Writing Consultants have gone on to direct writing centers at other colleges and universities, publish peer-reviewed articles about writing consulting, work as freelance editors and writing consultants, compete for academic jobs that require interdisciplinary teaching or teaching graduate students, and more.

Responsibilities

Here are some guidelines for being a Graduate Writing Center consultant:

  • Attend a 2-day training in August before the Fall semester begins.
  • Hold 3 to 4 conferences per week—sometimes more, sometimes less– depending on your assistantship hours.
  • Meet with the Coordinator and other Consultants bi-weekly.
  • Present strategies for working within your disciplines to the Coordinator and other Consultants as needed. Actively learn about other disciplines in order to add to your knowledge about writing across the disciplines.
  • Design and lead a workshop/ writing event once per semester.
  • Develop and maintain relationships with your clients and departments. Make sure your communities know about your services. Form new relationships and partnerships. Seek out opportunities to support Baylor graduate student writers.
  • With any unfilled hours beyond scheduled appointments, you will:
    1. Add to our working annotated bibliography (research about Writing Centers, resources for graduate students, academic writing in your specific field). This research may be shared at monthly meetings.
    2. Produce content for our blog in the form of book reviews, blog posts, tutorial videos, etc.

Applicant Criteria

  • Doctoral student
  • Demonstrated writing proficiency within their academic field
  • Experience with the academic publishing process
  • Strong verbal and written communication skills
  • Strong organizational skills
  • Self-starter

Writing Genres: The Dissertation

By Jonathan Kanary, GWC Consultant

When I started working on my dissertation, I thought I knew how to write. After all, I had successfully completed seminar papers. I had prepared and delivered talks for conferences. I had even placed a couple of scholarly articles. Surely I had the hang of this academic writing thing by now, right?

Then I got my director’s feedback on a draft chapter. He was gracious, and he liked a lot of what I was doing. But he also made it clear that my work needed a lot of revision. I started to think, “maybe I don’t know what I’m doing after all.”

The Problem

Almost no one who begins writing a dissertation has ever written a dissertation before. You might have written a master’s thesis, and that helps. But you’re also new to this.

The good news is that if you’ve gotten this far, you’ve done a lot of writing. You have most of the skills you need to complete the task.

The challenge is that it isn’t exactly the same task. If you want to master the dissertation, you have to understand what kind of thing it is: its genre.

In this post, I want to break the dissertation’s genre into three parts: the purpose, the audience, and the format.

The Purpose

What is a dissertation for? This might seem like an obvious question: you’re making a scholarly argument. If you’re in STEM or the Social Sciences, the basis for your argument is probably a study, or a series of studies. If you’re in the Humanities, the material for your argument will likely include evidence you have gathered from books and articles. Your task is to make this argument and make it well.

True—but incomplete. Your dissertation has a second major purpose: showing that you’ve done your work. In today’s world, a graduate degree is a kind of credential. It’s a stamp of approval that you have the competencies those letters after your name represent. Your dissertation tells your committee that they don’t have to feel bad about giving you that stamp of approval. They can release you into the world with a reasonable hope that you know how to do the sorts of things that people with advanced degrees in your field do. This means that you need to demonstrate the thoroughness of your research. And you have to explain—maybe more fully than you would in other kinds of academic writing—exactly how your argument relates to other scholars’ work.

The Audience

Who is the dissertation for? Again, this initially seems obvious: you write for your committee. But have you thought about what that means? Your director may or may not have a high degree of expertise in the specific area of your project. Other members of your committee have relevant expertise; but they almost certainly don’t all work in your exact area. If you have an “outside reader” from another department, or someone from your own department who does a very different kind of research, they may not know all the technical terminology you’re using. They may lack historical context. When you reference a scholarly work that has defined your area, they may not know why it’s such a big deal.

Ask yourself, “What might someone on my committee need to know for this argument to make sense?” And then figure out how to include that information.

Although the primary audience for a dissertation is your committee, you could end up having a secondary audience: other scholars working in your area. I am citing several dissertations as I write my own. However, if you do a good job providing background for everyone on your committee, it will likely be enough for secondary readers as well.

The Format

So how the heck do I put together this dissertation?

Here, I have good news: the Graduate School has lots of resources to help you format your dissertation properly. (Hint: If you go ahead and put your draft into this format to begin with, it will save you a lot of time later.)

But you might also want to ask your director if he or she can point you to an earlier dissertation that proved successful. Sometimes seeing what an acceptable entry in the genre looks like can help you imagine your own.

Getting Done

Notice, I said an “acceptable” entry, not a “brilliant” or “ground-breaking” one. More than one faculty member has told me, “A good dissertation is a done dissertation.” It doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. This isn’t the last thing you get to write. You will have plenty of time to revise before it becomes a book or a series of articles. Just keep your purpose in mind, pursue it in a way that will make sense to your audience, and follow the basic format.

You can do this.

 

Jonathan Kanary is a PhD candidate in English at Baylor, where he serves as a consultant for the Graduate Writing Center and teaches for the Great Texts department. His research focuses on the intersection of literature and spirituality, with a particular interest in the Middle Ages and 19th-20th century British literatures.

 

Book Review: Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott

By Jonathan Kanary, Consultant

Review of Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life by Anne Lamott

Anne Lamott is not an academic, nor is her book intended for an academic audience. She has taught a lot of writing workshops, but mostly she assumes that her readers are writing stories. So why should you, a busy grad student, consider reading her book—or at least a blog post about it? Four reasons:

  1. Lamott is a really good writer, and Bird by Bird is enjoyable to read. (Remember reading for pleasure?)
  2. She’s also really funny.
  3. She tells us that this book includes everything she knows about writing. It’s her writing workshop between paperback covers. Some of that wisdom is helpful for grad student types, as well. (And if you’re secretly writing a novel, or maybe a memoir or movie script, there’s a goldmine of good advice here for you.)
  4. Note the subtitle: she’s also offering instructions on life. Frequently her insights about writing spill over into wry and sometimes painful (but still funny) observations about what it’s like to be human, and how bad we are at it, and how we might come to grips with that reality and learn to accept the kind of person we actually are. Do I even need to say that this is also relevant for grad students?

However, since you’re busy and may not have time to read the whole book, this post will synthesize some highlights.

The most directly relevant material shows up in the first three chapters. Here Lamott offers three simple but extremely important suggestions.

First: find consistency. “‘But how?’ my students ask. ‘How do you actually do it?’ You sit down, I say. You try to sit down at the same time every day… you turn on your computer and bring up the right file, and then you stare at it for an hour or so.” Distractions come: interior voices, external interruptions, neck-pain. “Yet somehow in the face of all this, you clear a space for the writing voice… and you begin to compose sentences” (6-7). You write by showing up every day and putting some words together.

But you also break the work down into short assignments. “[A]ll I have to do is to write down as much as I can see through a one-inch picture frame” (17), Lamott says. She keeps an actual one-inch frame on her desk as a reminder. For those of us overwhelmed by a seminar paper or a dissertation chapter, sometimes the answer is to break it down into very small pieces.

Third, write shitty first drafts. (My friend who uses this chapter in her freshman writing classes abbreviates to “SFDs.”) If you’re like me, you want to sit down and compose something beautiful—and publication-worthy—on the first try. But Lamott says real writing isn’t like this. The disastrous first draft is how we get to a better second draft, and maybe a third draft that’s actually good.

Part of her point is that “Very few writers really know what they are doing until they’ve done it” (22). I almost always have to go back and revise my thesis statement after I draft a paper, because then I finally know what I’m arguing. But professional writers like Lamott do the same sort of thing: “Everyone I know flails around, kvetching and growing despondent, on the way to finding a plot and structure that work” (85). If you’re an academic, just swap in the word “argument” for “plot.” Of course you want to get it right the first time. But remember: “perfectionism is the voice of the oppressor” (28, 93).

Writing is hard, Lamott thinks, and so is being human, and sometimes those two hard things collide. She has plenty to say about real-life challenges: the distractions, the efforts that don’t work and get rewritten and still don’t work, the sense of inadequacy. There’s a whole chapter titled “Jealousy.” Grad students I know talk about impostor syndrome, the belief that somehow I’ve ended up here amongst all these smart people and someday they’ll realize I don’t belong and throw me out again. But we don’t talk as much about the flip side, jealousy: the feeling that so-and-so from your department is winning success after success, when his scholarship honestly isn’t as good as yours. Both forms of self-comparison can be deadly. Lamott thinks that sometimes you have to step away from those people, so you can actually do your own work.

But you need other people, too. Seeking feedback is risky, and potentially painful: Lamott says that any time someone gives her a lot of suggestions, her initial response is, “Well. I’m sorry, but I can’t be friends with you anymore” (166). But she believes that every writer needs someone who cares enough about her and her work to tell the truth about it, and offer honest help. She strongly recommends writing groups. Or you can ask a friend. Or—shameless plug—send a draft to the Graduate Writing Center.

The truth is, we all struggle with writing. Anne Lamott does too, and her honesty about the struggle may be the most helpful thing about her book. But Bird by Bird is also a constant reminder that we don’t have to struggle alone.

Book Review: Why Can’t They Write by John Warner

By Ed Eschler, Consultant

Why They Can't Write | Johns Hopkins University Press Books

As I sit to write this, I am suddenly very aware of the expected format of the book review: an initial paragraph where John Warner is introduced as an award winning author and professor at Charleston College; a paragraph or two discussing his exploration of writing education, his personal writing philosophy, and his pedagogical advice; and finally a conclusion where I discuss that, while his primary audience is educators and policymakers, this is a book worth the time of anyone serious about understanding the gap between what we are taught about writing and the actual practice of writing. Do I follow that format because it helps me convey an idea I feel is important to express, or am I mimicking what I have been told good writing looks like instead of actually writing something good?

This dilemma is the core of Why They Can’t Write. Warner’s stated answer to the book’s title is “They’re doing what we’ve trained them to do: that’s the problem.” Parts one and two are expansions of this statement, a detailed historical dissection of writing education and assessment. The educational system in the United States has become more and more reliant on standardized testing, making it the key metric by which student writing is evaluated. Unfortunately, the need for efficient grading has made us reward writing that fits easily evaluated forms instead of writing that communicates. We have fallen victim to Campbell’s Law: “The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision making . . . the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is meant to monitor.” Teaching students how to twist their writing into a five-paragraph essay instead of how to choose the best structure to meaningfully convey an idea is a symptom of this disease.

Sections three and four are where Warner proposes and supports his solution. Part of the problem with how we train students to write is reliance on “folklore” about how writing instruction should be done. He argues against popular wisdom, like focusing on grammar or prioritizing grit over informed decision making (a point he exemplifies with Will Smith’s determination to make After Earth). He advocates writing instruction that emphasizes writing as a social act. Collating a body of evidence from education scholars, he shows that when writing instruction focuses on meaningful communication and students are given the freedom to make choices—and mistakes—they demonstrate a growth not shown in those who pour “academic” words like plethora or myriad into tightly structured forms in pursuit of an A. He also shows how many desirable traits like grammatical proficiency and research skills tend to sort themselves out if the emphasis of instruction is on that social act.

The book is written to several groups. Writing instructors are probably the best served, with extensive discussions of pedagogy and example assignments he personally uses to promote the ideas the book covers. Policy makers and educational administrators might feel chastised at points, but there is ample evidence to support Warner’s critiques and so they would be wise to listen. More relevant to our discussion is the final audience, writers. Should we as graduate writers read Why They Can’t Write?

Selective Focus Photo of Person Writing

I think it depends on where you are personally on your writing journey. If you are just returning to graduate school and haven’t done much writing since your undergrad, the first half of this book will introduce you to the difference in the sort of assessment-focused writing you may have the most experience with and the idea/communication-focused writing you will be expected to do in graduate school. In that way the book is almost therapy, helping you to understand where certain bad habits might come from and forming a foundation you can built future good habits upon. The book is also worthwhile for writers who enjoy reading books about writing and expanding their general philosophy about the nature of writing itself.

Who it is less useful for is a practiced writer who is looking for concrete advice. If you have done any amount of quality professional or graduate-level writing, odds are you have already learned the lessons this book teaches. The history and philosophy are well-written and interesting, but not necessary to improve your writing. You’ll be better served by one of the other books we recommend on this blog.

Why They Can’t Write is not the sort of book we normally discuss here. It does not primarily speak to writers, which tends to be our focus. However, the ideas it presents about the writing process are important for graduate students who want to be successful writers to understand, even if you will never teach a writing course or form education policy. If you already understand those ideas, then you can pass this book by. But if you’re not sure why you can’t write, John Warner has a few ideas he’d like to communicate.

Book Review: How to Write a Lot by Paul J. Silvia

Greg Barnhill, Consultant

Are you a binge writer? I am. I’ve been a binge writer all of graduate school. That writing strategy, while manageable for a seminar paper perhaps, can only take you so far, as I’ve found out with my dissertation. A dissertation or thesis is professional writing, no matter what field you’re in. It’s your way of showing your professional credentials. And how do professionals go about their work? Well, that’s what Paul Silvia’s How to Write a Lot will tell you.

The thesis of Silvia’s book is quite simple, and everything revolves around it: “Prolific writers make a schedule and stick to it” (p. 12). “Don’t quit before you start—making a schedule is the secret to productive writing” (p. 15). “Successful professional writers, regardless of whether they’re writing novels, nonfiction, poetry, or drama, are prolific because they write regularly, usually every day” (p. 27). Everything that follows in Silvia’s book comes as motivation for and reflection upon the writing that a writer has scheduled, since she is a professional writer and approaches writing like a job.

But wait—graduate students are not professional writers, are they? Think again! The writing you do as a graduate student is part of your career, whether a prelude to future research or a teaching career (or an alt-ac career), or even the starting point for professional contributions within specific professional organizations and journals. If you are a graduate student, then you are already a professional writer of a specific sort. Becoming a successful and prolific writer in your professional field, according to Silvia, involves adopting this point of view and allowing it to change your outlook on writing.

Practical Tips

Silvia provides (at least) two helpful discussions for all writers. First, he dismantles common “specious barriers” to writing that will keep one from actually doing it. Second, he offers several practical motivational tools that are oriented toward the main goal of making a schedule and sticking to it. Whatever one does, one must never give up on keeping a writing schedule, no matter how good things are going. “Rewarding writing by abandoning your schedule is like rewarding yourself for quitting smoking by having a cigarette” (pp. 44–45). Silvia’s suggestions in the first few chapters are immensely practical, so much so that I found myself instantly jotting down how I could work the exact plan that he lays out for his readers to follow. A few highlights:

  • Ruthlessly protect your writing time: no meetings, no email, no news, no phone. Do not schedule over your writing time.
  • Create a concrete goal for each writing time, usually during the first few moments of your scheduled writing time.
  • Create a spreadsheet to monitor your writing progress, which has various motivational benefits if you stick to your schedule.
  • Create a list of your writing projects and prioritize which ones you should tackle first. This helps to not feel overwhelmed. Silvia makes suggestions about how to prioritize.

While the latter half of the book may be most helpful for others within the discipline of Psychology in particular, it is nevertheless worth reading by all academic writers for insights into Style, Writing Journal Articles, and Writing Books (Chapters Five, Six, and Seven). Silvia has a word of encouragement for those trying to get published: “Researchers who publish a lot of articles receive a lot of rejections” (p. 99). In Silvia’s view, it simply comes with the territory of voluminous output. (Since you’ve been writing every day, right?)

So, with summer underway and, most likely, a different sort of schedule ahead in the coming months, will you follow Silvia’s advice and make a writing schedule? When and where will you write? What rituals can you create to get you to that time and place and keep you writing every day? How will you track it? How will you reward yourself for sticking to it? Rewards should come not only for obvious milestones (a conference or article acceptances, perhaps) but simply for doing the job itself consistently. Writing is indeed difficult, but Silvia suggests taking an honest look at how you are setting yourself up to succeed or fail at it. The most valuable contribution of Silvia’s book is the way it leads to greater self-reflection on how I might move past my own binge writing to become a pro writer.

“Out of Office”: Advice for Working from Home

By Ed Eschler, Consultant

Among freelance writers and artists there’s a truism that makes its rounds: when you set your own hours, every day is Saturday—but you work Saturdays. With COVID-19 getting us all to social distance and shelter in place, a lot of graduate students very suddenly find ourselves working in unstructured environments. This can create a situation where we have more “free time” but are getting less done.

What we’ve done here is compiled a list of tips often shared among freelance and other “from home” workers that helps them be productive when working from the same location as their children, pets, televisions, and beds. While not exhaustive, they can help you make sure the quarantine doesn’t become a dead spot in your progress towards completing your program.

Set Up an “Office” to Work From

If you have space in your home to have an actual, dedicated office, that’s great. Those quotation marks in the header are for those of us living in studio/single room apartments: designate a space somewhere in your home as a work-only space. It can be a desk, one end of your kitchen table, or failing or a specific chair you only sit in when working. If you don’t live alone, let people know that this is your office, and when you’re there, you’re working.

Now, of course, this means that you should only do work-related tasks in your designated space. No social media, no web surfing, no chit chatting. I’m not saying you can’t do those things (and those of you with partners or children know that it would be a dealbreaker to sit in stony silence all day), but “leave the office” to do them. Stand up, walk to the other side of the room, or, if you can, do non-work activities on a different device/computer than your work computer. Make sure your work space is a work space.

Do a Pseudo-Commute

Xinixie (@Xinixie_Twitch) | Twitter

Part of what helps us separate our work life from our home life is the ritual of getting ready and actually going to work. 

When we work at home, it’s tempting to just sit down in whatever we’re wearing and get to it, but doing so can cause work and our other activities to blend together, and when that happen work time tends to slowly disappear (or, less common but probably worse, work consumes all of your time at home). Keep work and non-work distinct by creating a going-to-work ritual: change into work clothes, maybe take a walk around the block, and—not pointing any fingers—shower and groom as if you were going to work with other people.

Of course, you are still working from home, so you set the dress code and likely only need to be presentable when teleconferencing. Work clothes may simply mean designated daytime pajamas, and I think we’ve all noticed some scraggly quarantine beards popping up on social media and in our Zoom meetings. Much like establishing an office is about creating physical space to work, doing your pseudo-commute is about creating mental space; the specifics of what that looks like are up to you.

Schedule Breaks and Be Available to Family/Roommates

Much like setting up a distinct space and a pre-work ritual, scheduling specific work times can be a great help to keep work distinct and to make sure you’re getting something done. When scheduling, don’t forget that you need to schedule breaks as well: short 5 to 20 minute breaks every couple of hours can help with productivity. You can also use them as self-rewards for completing a small part of a larger task: say, 5 minutes for every page completed.

At the same time, it is important to remember that you are not actually a telecommuter. A global emergency is forcing you to work at home. It is okay to schedule yourself much longer breaks, or to take unscheduled breaks, for mental health reasons. The people you live with are also probably under a lot of stress too: as crazy as it is to hear sometimes, you and the people in your lives are more important than work deadlines. Don’t use the pandemic as an excuse to not work at all, that can be unhealthy in its own right, but be kind and supportive to yourself and those you live with, which sometimes means being less productive and more available.

Make a Small Daily Goal and Hit It Every Day

If you write a page a day, you can finish a thesis or dissertation chapter in a month. You can write a book a year. This isn’t some crazy fantasy: every field has one or two scholars who have more books on their CV than everyone else has articles, and this is almost certainly how they do it, writing a small amount every single day. Most of them are just as busy as everyone else, if not busier, but they make and keep this small daily commitment.

You don’t need to write a quarantine book, nor do you need to be at your most productive away from your lab or running statistical models through a remote desktop connection. But even if you write just a paragraph a day, you will have something to show when the world settles down and things get back to normal.

Conclusion

This is a very unique time, but the challenges it presents are not totally unique. Although the circumstances and rationale were different, there are many people who have chosen to work in the conditions we have found thrust upon us, and they have been able to have satisfying and productive careers. By following their advice, we can make sure that we both are productive and have time to connect to friends and loved ones during this time of physical distance.

Book Review: Deep Work by Cal Newport

By Greg Barnhill, Consultant

You need to read this book. Cal Newport, an academic and accomplished author, breaks down why we find “being productive” so difficult and, more importantly, what we can do about it.

In 287 well-researched pages, Newport explains both what is “Deep Work” and how to go about doing as much of it as humanly possible, while documenting the dangers and threats to this vision at every turn. If anything, Newport’s book is a perceptive meditation on the difficulty of doing one’s best work and how to overcome that difficulty. For graduate students—and Newport knows personally the unique struggles of academia—this book offers a vision for setting patterns and rituals that will lead to consistent contributions to one’s field.

What is “Deep Work” & Why Should We Care?

Newport defines “Deep Work” as “Professional activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limit. These efforts create new value, improve your skill, and are hard to replicate” (3). The goal is “to wring every last drop of value out of your current intellectual capacity” (3). In Part One he explores why deep work is worthwhile: it is economically valuable and advantageous, leading to economic security; the alternative, shallow work, does not lead to economic security; and deep work is more fulfilling, not only economically but on a personal level. Readers might quibble with defining value so often in economic terms in Chapters One and Two (although as graduate students your end goal is to get a job!), but through personal anecdotes and a philosophical argument for depth, Newport does show that “to build your working life around the experience of flow produced by deep work is a proven path to deep satisfaction” (86).

“Less mental clutter means more mental resources available for deep thinking.”

I must admit that I had two reservations before reading this book, and Newport has proven me wrong about both. First, I expected the book’s argument to be built upon personal stories that motivated me to dig deep within myself and simply work harder. I did not want to hear another message like that. Instead, Newport offers an incredibly well-researched perspective—a major strength of the book. When he makes a surprising claim, such as “embrace boredom,” he quickly shifts to studies and other relevant data to support his proposals and rarely resorts to opinion.

Second, I expected to find elements of a moral treatise that takes a stance against the world of distraction and its effects upon our ability to work productively. Newport, however, has no interest in the debate about whether tech is the future or our downfall as a society. For him, the commitment to deep work “is instead a pragmatic recognition that the ability to concentrate is a skill that gets valuable things done” (258). Part Two of the book—called “The Rules”—follows this pragmatic approach and outlines in four chapters how to enact the vision of deep work.

Grad School Takeaways

Since Newport is an academic (an assistant professor of computer science), much of what he envisions applies naturally to the academic context. Here are some takeaways that might prove immediately applicable to the context of being a graduate student and particularly to the task of writing.

Attention Residue Effect: Interruptions and obligations lead to “attention residue” when one is working on a large project such as writing a paper. Newport recommends minimizing this attention residue and maximizing performance on one task at a time. By planning high-intensity, focused, and distraction-free work (i.e., deep work), one can avoid the negative effect of task-switching.

Take Control of Your Time: You only have so much willpower, so set a schedule for yourself that ritualizes deep work. Where will you work and for how long? And how will you support your work? (Think: coffee, snacks, etc.) Making these decisions ahead of time allows one to focus on the deep work itself.

Daily Shutdown: Newport recommends deciding when you will stop working and sticking to it. Studies show that one cannot perform deep work for more than four or so hours a day, and that downtime improves the performance of the bursts of high-intensity deep work that should characterize our days. So, make a ritual that helps you to shut down your work for the day. Paradoxically, not working can make your deep work more productive.

Quit Social Media: Newport really does say that! But he doesn’t mean what you think he means. Leaving aside the research that he cites about the negative effects of social media on intellectual capabilities, Newport intends for his readers to reflect on whether social media leads them to their career goals. In his view, such an exercise will show one how to free up time and mental resources for deep work; “Less mental clutter means more mental resources available for deep thinking” (252). Think about your time and commitments in terms of tools—what will most effectively help you accomplish your goals? Newport’s advice is radical: drop everything except the most essential!

Newport’s book offers much more, but most importantly it fundamentally reframes the question about work and time. Everyone has the same amount of time. Newport argues that your best work will come when you tend to the quality of your work and the focus with which you go about doing it.

Utilizing Baylor’s Graduate Writing Center Resources

By Becca Cassady, Consultant/Coordinator

Ask almost any graduate student—almost anyone in higher ed, really—and we’ve been there: So deep in a dissertation chapter that we can’t write our way out.  Stumped by cryptic “revise and resubmit” feedback. Unable to please a grant committee comprised of academics outside of our discipline.  Intimidated by a blank Word document at the beginning of a project. Even when we’re pretty pleased with a document, sometimes we still hesitate to hit “send.”

Writing can be hard. Especially if you feel like you’re in it alone.

Enter the Graduate Writing Center (GWC). The GWC is a Graduate School service designed to aid graduate students with their various writing projects—from class assignments to dissertation chapters to job application materials.   We help brainstorm, reorganize complex arguments, reword ambiguous or unclear sentences, and more. All of our consultants are advanced stage doctoral students with extensive writing training and experience.  We offer writing groups that you can opt into each semester, occasional workshops, and one-on-one consultations.

I’ve had students ask me, “Isn’t this mainly for people in humanities?” Absolutely not!  Our consultants are from humanities, social sciences, and STEM fields; as the coordinator, I do my best to pair students with a consultant within their discipline or a closely related one.

When they’re not experts in your subject matter, consultants act as “expert outsiders”: experts in writing who can offer a fresh perspective, ensuring that you’re communicating clearly to an outside audience.* They are trained in what questions to ask and what concerns to look for.

Our Approaches to Consultations

When we meet with you one-on-one, we aim to create meaningful writing experiences by using a variety of best practices.  I’ve listed a few of our priorities below.  (And just so you don’t have to take my word for it, I’ve included real student evaluations from our feedback surveys.)

We dedicate ample time to written and verbal feedback. We know that graduate level writing is complex and often long. (Those dissertation chapters are no joke!) Our consultants spend one to two hours with your project before your appointment to compile thoughtful written comments. This makes your one-hour in person (or online) meetings far more focused and productive.

“[The consultant] had gone over my document before we met and had great ideas for rearranging the structure of it. But she also listened to my concerns about it as we were meeting and adjusted feedback on the spot.” (May 2019)

We listen. Our goal is to help you say what you need and want to say.

“[The consultant] addressed my concerns very specifically, and our discussion in which I bounced around different ideas was very helpful. She was a good sounding board.” (December 2018)

“I appreciated how unbiased the consultant was; even though he personally disagreed with my argument, was still helpful and thoughtful. As someone who is terrible at objectivity, I appreciated that.” (December 2018)

“[The consultant] had great and helpful feedback! She was willing to listen to what I needed and tailor her comments to my concerns (i.e., project organization or sentence level issues depending on the stage of the project.)” (December 2018)

We help students develop long-term writing strategies while working with assignments.  Much of our time is aimed at improving individual assignments sent our way: we discuss argument, content, sentence flow, wording, and more.  However, we also use those as opportunities to teach clients strategies and tools to help them in future writing projects.

“[My consultant] is amazing! She takes the time to teach me writing skills…[S]he doesn’t just help me correct mistakes. I have learned so much from her this year.” (May 2019)

We see our student colleagues first and foremost as people, not assignments. Sometimes what you need in graduate school is encouragement. Our consultants speak not only from a place of expertise but also from a place of understanding.  We have been and currently are experiencing the demands of academia right alongside you. You can be sure we’re rooting for you.

“Encouraging and constructive feedback that was sufficiently detailed without feeling overwhelming.” (December 2018)

In using these approaches, it’s my hope that you walk away with a stronger paper and clarity about recommended revisions and future projects.

Debunking Writing Center Myths

Finally, I want to correct two common misconceptions about the Graduate Writing Center:

  1. “GWC consultants are proofreaders.” We are consultants, not proofreaders. We believe our most helpful resource is our consultants’ position as writing experts or “expert outsiders.”  We want your time with the consultant to be spent talking through what we call “higher order concerns” – things like argument, structure, flow, and clarity—rather than punctuation or formatting. That doesn’t mean we don’t deal with sentence level issues; we are happy to point out errors as we provide feedback. However, we will never merely correct a paper for you.  Our goal is to equip you to proofread your own papers, identify errors, and correct them on your own. Almost anyone can double-check the use of italics or commas for you, but we value our consultants’ writing and content expertise and hope you will, too!
  1. “GWC consultants will perfect my paper.” We can’t guarantee perfection. (Wouldn’t that be grand if we could?!) From applications to class assignments, there are many factors that go into a project’s evaluation that are beyond our control. However, our consultants aim to get to know the project’s audience and context before providing feedback to help you craft a document that is clearer, more readable, better organized, etc.

I hope you’ll give us the opportunity to work with you on your upcoming projects.  Send me an email at gwc@baylor.edu with your document and main concerns, and you’ll have taken your first step towards what I hope will be an encouraging and helpful consultation!

*Adler-Kassner, Linda and Elizabeth Wardle, eds. Naming What We Know: Threshold Concepts of Writing. UP of Colorado, 2016.