Writing About the Self as a Vital Component of Preparing Doctoral Students to Write for Research and Publication

Introduction

It’s Saturday morning. I am meeting with doctoral students in the field of literacy education who have agreed to participate in a writing group via video conferencing each week to work on their dissertations. I skip what would be a typical weekend routine of breakfast and laundry and log into my computer with a bottle of water balanced in one hand. I have invited six, but only four faithfully show up. The doctoral students are in different stages of completion with their dissertations. They are all struggling with disparate and myriad insecurities as writers but face the same challenge of joining a discourse community as a viable scholar. I start by spending a few minutes with each student to discuss their current writing goals, questions, and dilemmas. Their responses are both aspirational and timid:

I encourage students to write two pages of “new” writing during this time before tackling any revision and invite them to meet with me individually in a virtual breakout room if they want feedback or have questions. At the end of the two hours, we check in again to discuss progress and set new goals. Week after week, we work our way through recurring obstacles of synthesizing extant literature, describing data, and illuminating the significance of findings vis-à-vis pertinent theories. Watching students labor through these facets of dissertation writing, I am not sure if this group is succeeding in its mission. Meeting to write together does not automatically change the quality of novice scholarly writing—weak theoretical framing, inappropriate sources, repetitive language, stacked quotes, unsupported assertions, tangled sentences, a lost voice. I try to remedy these trends, but few of my comments stick at this stage in their doctoral work. I worry it is too late to teach much about scholarly writing when they are struggling with constructing and carrying out a rigorous and viable study, so I focus on scaffolding their thinking as researcher-writers:

This last question is a nudge to help students see the ways that composing and conceptualization are interwoven. There is so much for students to learn about writing for research and publication that I feel overwhelmed and think about how important it is to teach students the dispositions and cadences of scholarly writing long before they embark on a dissertation.

Writing is a critical academic skill. Yet, it is no secret that writing instruction in K-12 and post-secondary settings continues to fall short of preparing fluent scholarly writers (Graham & Harris, 2019; Warner, 2018). A contributing factor to this phenomenon is that poor writing instruction has a compounding effect (Applebee & Langer, 2011; National Commission on Writing in America’s Schools and Colleges, 2003). In secondary settings, educators are focused on helping students reach basic writing proficiency to pass standardized assessments (Lesley, Beach, Ghasemi, & Duru, 2020; Wahleithner, 2018). Such minimally prepared high school students, historically referred to as “basic writers,” then enter colleges and universities and find themselves in need of instruction in academic forms of writing commensurate with college-level expectations (Bizzell, 1986; Shaughnessy, 1976; Sommers & Saltz, 2004; Warner, 2018). Although students generally meet rudimentary requirements for writing in undergraduate programs, they often enter graduate school underprepared to engage in writing for research and publication (Defazio, Jones, Tennant, & Hook, 2010; Makombe, 2017). In fact, with respect to writing there is a “tacit belief that being admitted to graduate school is the end of the learning process and not the beginning” (Madden, 2016, p. 1). In many instances across the trajectory of secondary to post-secondary education, adolescents and adults have limited experiences with writing and few resources to draw upon to develop their skills. In higher education contexts, this snowballing effect requires methods that provide support for developing scholarly dispositions toward academic writing. In other words, graduate students need to master the nuances of writing tailored to the traditions and principles of conducting research.