Building Expertise: The Toolkit in UCLA's Graduate Writing Center

Summers, Sarah

doi:10.7771/2832-9414.1804

Cited by 4 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…[2] and [3] have noted that graduate students use writing centers in distinct ways. They bring many different types of projects, each with a variety of audiences, and many of their primary writing concerns relate to sentence-level issues with respect to grammar and clarity, as they feel that the high-stakes nature of their writing requires impeccable style and few, if any, errors.…”

Section: Literature Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In light of these unique preferences of graduate students, [3] notes that GWCs employ pedagogies and practices that are distinct from traditional university writing centers that are positioned to support undergraduate students writing for their coursework. With respect to the training of writing tutors for graduate students, [3] discusses the role of disciplinary experience for tutors, as graduate students' writing by necessity must reflect discipline-specific rhetorical moves, genre-recognition, and language, and as such, their tutors are expected to recognize such particularities and be able to enculturate students within discipline-specific communities.…”

Section: Literature Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Both instructors are full-time teaching faculty in the technical communication program housed within the engineering school, and both have decades of teaching graduate-level academic communication in specific fields, including engineering, law, and international relations. This type of instructional delivery bypasses some of the questions encountered by some university writing centers such as the efficacy of peer or undergraduate tutors [3], as well whether tutors should be generalists or specialists within students' fields. As technical communication faculty, the two faculty members approach assessment of student needs and work in terms of the efficacy of their communication in reaching their desired audience.…”

Section: Instructorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Building a Technical Writing Community: The First Year of a Writing and Speaking Tutoring Center for Engineering Ph.D. Students

Choi

2023 PSW Proceedings

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Graduate engineering students must produce a wide variety of high-quality and discipline-specific work throughout their post-baccalaureate study. They are expected to have expertise in writing journal and conference papers, dissertations, and qualifying proposals, while learning to communicate in accordance with the norms and expectations of their specific disciplines. However, few students have such expertise at the start of their graduate program, nor do they formally acquire it as part of their coursework. Direct writing instruction in engineering graduate programs is scarce, and to the extent that curricular or co-curricular technical communication instruction is offered, it is often deemed remedial or separate from disciplinary content knowledge. As a consequence, writing is largely devalued, despite its outsized role in graduate students' academic lives and careers in industry and academia.To address this gap, the Council of Graduate Schools recommends the establishment of graduate writing centers (GWCs) that are staffed by trained writing consultants for one-on-one tutoring and offer various professional career and mentoring workshops, retreats, and student-led writing groups. Research suggests that GWCs can help students cultivate professional skills and can provide emotional support in an environment that can often be isolating. Such services offered by GWCs have been shown to supplement writing coursework in shortening the duration of doctoral degree completion and attrition rates in Ph.D. programs.As over half of engineering graduate students are from outside the U.S., GWCs that serve this group must also offer support for students developing academic literacy in English. This sometimes involves embracing approaches traditionally disavowed by many writing centers, such as providing grammar instruction and other sentence-level support. The availability of such support, which is actively sought out by multilingual graduate student writers, diminishes the discourse deficit around their writing abilities with a more positive and inclusive stance.Currently, the University of Southern California (USC), offers a writing center operated by the university that provides writing assistance for all students, faculty and staff. To provide additional and specialized support for USC's 1,000 engineering Ph.D. students, the authors, who are faculty at the Engineering in Society Program at the USC Viterbi School of Engineering (Viterbi), launched the Communications Hub (Hub) in August 2022 with a one-year financial commitment from Viterbi. This unique academic support is based on the premise that graduate students carry out advanced disciplinary research and have extensive writing needs with a high level of rhetorical complexity that 1 are distinct from those of undergraduate writing. Students may be defining original research questions and making claims that involve a level of knowledge transformation that exceeds the standard approaches of traditional university writing centers.The Hub offers one-on-one writing and sp...

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Section: Literature Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Literature Overviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Instructorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Building a Technical Writing Community: The First Year of a Writing and Speaking Tutoring Center for Engineering Ph.D. Students

Choi

2023 PSW Proceedings

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What a Generalist Tutor Can Do: A Short Lesson from a Tutoring Session

Okuda

2017

DW/R

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In parallel to the unique history of writing instruction, Canadian writing specialists have drawn on different theories and principles from the U.S. literature in building their writing studies scholarship (Giltrow, 2016; Graves, 1993; Graves & Graves, 2006; Paré, 2017; Smith, 2006). This is evident in the “Statement on Writing Centres and Staffing” published by the Canadian Journal for Studies of Discourse and Writing (Graves, 2016). As a doctoral student researching U.S.-based writing centres from day one of graduate school, one striking cross-border difference I find was the statement’s clear recommendation that writing centres are fundamentally teaching units in which students learn to write in their disciplines. In American writing centre theory, peer tutoring is the basis of writing centre philosophy, with some claiming that the tutor’s unfamiliarity of the tutee’s discipline enhances the non-hierarchical learning environment (Bruffee, 1995; North, 1984; Pemberton, 1995).

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High-Impact Writing Support for Online Students Writing a Dissertation in Practice

Werse

Lively

Papadakis

2022

Research Anthology on Doctoral Student Professional Development

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This chapter examines the unique writing needs of professional doctoral students and the writing goals of the dissertation in practice that distinguish these students from traditional research-oriented graduate student writers. In this chapter, the authors survey emerging scholarship that establishes best practices for online writing support. Additionally, this chapter combines the insights gained from the discussion of professional doctoral students' unique needs and writing support research in order to establish applicable best practices to support online professional doctoral students in the dissertation in practice writing process. These best practices are further informed by the authors' practical experience of launching an online professional doctoral degree writing center that currently serves more than 300 online students. This chapter concludes that intentional, tailored writing support complements professional graduate degree students' course work through a structured approach to the writing process that emphasizes transferable skills and reflective value.

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Building Expertise: The Toolkit in UCLA's Graduate Writing Center

Cited by 4 publications

References 0 publications

Building a Technical Writing Community: The First Year of a Writing and Speaking Tutoring Center for Engineering Ph.D. Students

Building a Technical Writing Community: The First Year of a Writing and Speaking Tutoring Center for Engineering Ph.D. Students

What a Generalist Tutor Can Do: A Short Lesson from a Tutoring Session

High-Impact Writing Support for Online Students Writing a Dissertation in Practice

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