Special Issue: Graduate Reading and Writing Across the Curriculum

higher education, student writing, WAC, genre studies, second-language writers, scientific writing

Published August 25, 2015

Guest editors: Marilee Brooks-Gillies, Elena G. Garcia, Soo Hyon Kim, Katie Manthey, and Trixie G. Smith, Michigan State University

Writing instruction, support, and research often focus on undergraduate students, but graduate students need instruction and support, both formally and informally, and bring their own complex identities into liminal academic spaces, too. Historically, writing instruction has been pushed to the margins in academic disciplines, especially for graduate students who are often expected to be expert academic writers of a variety of specialized genres—such as academic articles, conference proposals and papers, and grant applications. Since disciplinary communities "have rarely integrated systematic writing instruction into their curricula to initiate the neophytes consciously into the written conventions of a particular field" (David Russell, 2002, p.17), graduate students seek out university resources, activities or other thirdspaces (Edward Soja, 1996, and/or Rhonda Grego & Nancy Thompson, 2008) offered outside their departments, such as writing center consultations, writing groups, and writing workshops, and often develop their own "underground" support systems. This special issue of ATD seeks to bring together discussions, strategies, programs, and courses that all address different ways of meeting the diverse writing needs of graduate students. The first section emphasizes a WAC approach to graduate writing. These pieces focus on dissertation writing, writing camps, and resources for L2 writers. They each consider graduate writing across multiple disciplines literally exploring the experiences of graduate writers across disciplines. In the second section, we focus on a WID approach to graduate writing. Each of these articles discusses graduate instruction within specific disciplines and programs, emphasizing the importance of considering local conditions and affordances when developing graduate writing programs.

Special Issue: Graduate Reading and Writing Across the Curriculum

Published August 25, 2015

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