Better Writers
Our Relationship to Graduate Student Writers in Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies

My dissertation research studies graduate students and how we teach them the disciplinary conventions of academic prose. Following the work of rhetorical genre theorists such as Catherine Schryer and Caroline R. Miller, I question how our mainstay academic genres in graduate school influence writing habits that are incommensurate with disciplinary genre expectations and the workload of faculty. I believe studying graduate students, the craft of academic prose, and writing as-it-happens is ironically an underexamined area of research in Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies (RCWS)—a field committed to undergraduate writing—that I contend is tied to our assimilative past. 

Our field has long struggled with assimilationist pedagogies that actively seek and destroy non-English ways of composing. We cannot ignore how the systematization of writing and the English language in the United States has a long and continued history of violence (e.g., Stuckey, Richardson, Kynard). If my Indigenous grandmother Aurora were still alive, she might share her history with having standard English forced onto her tongue. Gloria Anzaldúa remembers “being caught speaking Spanish at recess—that was good for three licks on the knuckles with a sharp ruler” (75). Victor Villanueva writes about becoming raceless after enculturating into the English language and academia, alluding to being “tonto in both languages” (48). Asao B. Inoue reminds us that “in or out of the classroom, we all are fighting an invisible racialized war on the battlefield of words. And what’s at stake is White language supremacy” (8). We are only beginning to reckon with settler colonialism’s aim to neglect non-standard ways of composing, even if we have been writing about it for generations (i.e., Students’ Rights to Their Own Language). And, let’s face it, we all write in our own way, making it a challenge to develop research on graduate student and faculty writing and writing processes. Yet, despite the complexities of literate practice (Prior, Shipka), I continue to maintain that there must be a way of holding these relationships accountable while still attending to the graduate writing pedagogy in our curriculum—the field does have expectations for how we compose. Are these expectations being relayed to our graduate students and how? 

Throughout this dissertation, I explore our relationship to writing processes and linguistic justice by reflecting on interview data from focal participants of a quantitative and qualitative research study on graduate student writing pedagogy. Inspired by Shawn Wilson’s concept of relational accountability, I broaden our examination of graduate student enculturation to attend not only to processes but the relationships between graduate writers, tacit disciplinary expectations, the classroom as land, and our scholarly forum. This is me advocating for a more sustained conversation about how to do the labor of the academic writer. 

My first chapter, “A Report on a National Study on Graduate Student Writing Pedagogy,” is grounded in survey data that asked both graduate students and faculty about their experiences learning to write in graduate school. I analyze survey data by highlighting emergent themes and trends like whether or not participants were trained to write an academic article or required to take a course that focused on their development as academic writers. I also reflect on the interview data writing researcher Paul Prior. More specifically, drawing on rhetorical genre theory, I explore where writing habits come from and how participants become disciplined as writers by tracing, and sometimes untangling, the enculturation of graduate students as they enter into academic conversations. The goal of this chapter is to try and understand why a field committed to undergraduate writing epistemology has minimal attention to graduate student writing pedagogy. 

In Chapter 2, “Our Responsibility to Graduate Students,” I offer three profiles of graduate students and faculty who are representative of the larger pool of interviews of the national study. Reflecting on these focal participants, this chapter argues for more attention to graduate student enculturation in our disciplinary forum and curriculum. Building on what Phelps calls a “cross-generational exchange” about graduate student development, I ask, how might we better meet the needs of graduate student writers today. Taking seriously our efforts for a more linguistically just discipline (e.g., Baker-Bell, Inoue, Gere et al.), this chapter interrogates how White language supremacy—including disciplinary genre expectations, course structures, and assessment practices—affects graduate student development. I argue that we must continue to consider how our graduate support networks are mediating the relationship between our graduate students and their writing/processes if we are to honor our commitment to linguistic justice. 

In my third chapter, I confront a critique that might be raised: “Is there Really a Problem?” After all, our field has continued to grow exponentially over the years, with an increasingly diverse faculty, programs, and conferences—all markers of a healthy disciplinary community. Yet, as Micciche and Carr have pointed out, just because the field has grown significantly from its conception, doesn’t mean our graduate student writing pedagogy is being developed to meet the increasing needs of faculty as they find homes in the field. Research continues to show that graduate students are not prepared for the writing demands of the professoriate (Peirce and Enos). This chapter draws on interview data to explore this question by focusing on how participants discuss writing community. Even though some participants received a modest amount of writing support, found tenure track jobs, or won even awards they still discussed struggling to navigate disciplinary genre expectations. I identify the problem of graduate student writing pedagogy as being broader than the disconnect between what faculty practice and what graduate students need—a major part of the problem is the lack of a disciplinary epistemology committed to research concerning out graduate students. 

In my fourth and fifth chapters, building on my own histories and Indigenous methods, I make a case for graduate writing instruction as a relational practice with attention to craft. In Chapter 4, “Finding my Manera,” I situate the writing classroom as land, exploring what graduate students might learn in a classroom dedicated to craft. By first demonstrating that writing and writing processes are typically discussed through a lens of activities that surround writing, I argue for an attention to writing as an activity. Previous discussions about writing processes in RCWS have provided useful insight into the lives of writing faculty and how they imagine themselves producing writing (Tulley). However, these texts offer little writing support to graduate students who find themselves struggling to figure out not only what to say or write but how to do so. By interrogating common writing advice given to graduate students, I identify how the writing ethics we value might be imagined in the graduate classroom. This chapter shows how the relationship between graduate students, faculty, and writing can be facilitated through relational accountability and the act of writing together in the classroom as a pedagogical practice. In my fifth and concluding chapter, “Writing Together: A Theory of Graduate Student Writing Pedagogy,” I analyze the seminar paper as a common graduate student genre in order to assess its pedagogical value—in doing so I hope to show how rhetorical genre theory might be used to further understand our tacit disciplinary conventions. I then turn to a theory of relational accountability in the graduate classroom by reflecting on the work of Shawn Wilson and small efforts I practice with my undergraduate students to nurture writing community. Additionally, I consider the potential of new technologies to study and support writing processes. Lastly, I turn to my graduate student interview participants, whom I asked, “what kind of graduate writing pedagogy do you recommend.” I share short interview transcripts of participants answering this question.