Sustainable writing for graduate students: writing retreats offer vital support

ABSTRACT

This article describes the effects of sequential non-residential writing retreats on graduate students the development of sustainable writing practices in the latter stages of writing theses and dissertations. Our study looks to understand how graduate students implement techniques of academic writing productivity. We collected data from three short, non-residential graduate student writing retreats in 2017. The retreats were hosted by a research support programme at a large public university in the United States (U.S.). We used a qualitative case study design and employed grounded theory. We analysed participant responses on exit evaluations and in interviews about their experiences in one or more retreats. Graduate students who participated in more than one retreat within a year expressed feelings of greater writing confidence and productivity, thus, exhibiting of the value of non-residential retreats to student thesis and dissertation writing processes. We found many graduate students have difficulty post-retreat maintaining writing habits. Our findings concur with existing studies about the benefits of retreats for academic writing productivity and expand on those studies to note that graduate student researchers can benefit from attending multiple retreats to build and sustain a regular writing practice among their campus community of writers.

KEYWORDS:

• Graduate student
• sustainable writing
• academic writing
• writing retreats
• writing habits

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kristina Quynn

Kristina Quynn is an assistant professor with a joint appointment in the Graduate School and English Department at Colorado State University, Fort Collins. She is the founding director of CSU Writes (2015), a writing programme for academic and research writers. Trained as a literary scholar, she has published in Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, The Journal of Midwest Modern Language Association (JMMLA), the MLA Teaching Approaches Series, and elsewhere. She recently co-edited the essay collection Reading and Writing Experimental Texts: Innovative Criticism (Palgrave 2017). Her current book project explores notions of sustainability and writing practice for faculty, postdocs, and graduate students at research institutions. https://csuwrites.colostate.edu

Cyndi Stewart

Cyndi Stewart is an adjunct professor in the Business School at Metro State University. She is also a Human Resources Consultant based in Golden, CO, where she works with clients to set up human resources functions and develop their human resources strategy and presence. Her doctoral research at Colorado State University focused on the support value of writing retreats for graduate students. She is a contributor to The Praeger Handbook of Human Resource Management.