I am the founding Director of The Writing Center at The Graduate Center, CUNY. I have had faculty appointments in the English Department of Baruch College, CUNY and the Princeton Writing Program. Before that, I served as Director of the Johns Hopkins Writing Center while completing my doctorate. I am the author of Shakespeare and the Truth-Teller: Confronting the Cynic Ideal (Edinburgh 2019). I’m currently working on a book for graduate students and early career scholars titled Writing Smarter: An Academic’s Guide to Building Knowledge Better.

Since founding a graduate writing center in 2019, I’ve thought a lot about the role of graduate writing support. Academics succeed and fail on the basis of their written scholarship and application materials (grants, job letters, promotion letters, etc.), yet most graduates students never get direct instruction in advanced academic writing. This is a problem that needs to be addressed by institutions of higher education everywhere.

Graduate students need help navigating different genres of academic writing, but more than that, they need help understanding how to use the writing process to do an incredibly ambitious thing: build knowledge at a scale and level of complexity that cannot be accomplished by a person simply thinking things through in their head. Through writing and revision, we can layer our analytical efforts to produce written scholarship that is, in effect, smarter than the person who wrote it. Writing is a technology we can use to think beyond our biological limits, but it’s use doesn’t come naturally to any of us. When we don’t use it well, we experience the anguish of our cognitive limitations all the more acutely. By contrast, when we do use it well—by going slowly and rechecking every step, indeed, by expanding our sense of the kinds of steps we need to take—we produce written artifacts that contain and convey otherwise unrealizable brilliance.