Across the disciplines, graduate-level training tends to focus on mastery of field-specific content without much or any explicit instruction on the craft of academic writing. Yet writing is essential to a scholar’s professional success in two key ways. Most obviously, writing is the medium through which research is communicated to others, and so it must be clear in order to be effective. Less obviously, but perhaps more importantly, writing is a technology of thought through which an academic can organize and develop their thoughts with a rigor and discipline that exceeds the capacities of their organic brain. In other words, writing is a medium through which higher knowledge is made, not simply transmitted. This second dimension of writing is often overlooked by graduate students and early career academics. I help graduate students and early career academics understand how to use the writing process to build knowledge and communicate effectively.

Contact me to schedule a lecture, workshop, or consultation.

Student Workshops

I am available to lead workshops on various aspects of academic writing, including:

• Writing in an occluded genre (the job letter, the grant proposal, the fellowship application, etc.)

• Writing-to-Think Away From the Formal Draft: Techniques for Pinning Down One’s Arguments and Ideas

• Understanding the Tone Police: Navigating Power Dynamics as an Early Career Academic Writer

• Applying to jobs in writing programs that follow the Harvard Expos model (at places like Princeton, Columbia, NYU, Fordham, Yale, Duke, Stanford, USC, and many others)

Writing Center Consultations and Staff Development

I offer consulting services for schools interested in developing their own graduate writing center. I also run staff development sessions for existing writing centers on a range of topics specific to the needs of graduate student writers. These include:

• Supporting science writers as a humanist

• Writing for selection committees: job letters, teaching statements, grants, etc.

• Managing the boundary between writing support and therapy

Faculty development

Because faculty are the primary source of instruction and mentorship for graduate students, arming faculty with writing-support frameworks is an impactful way to increase student success. These frameworks include:

• Understanding academic voice and its misuse as a standard for gatekeeping

• The role of explicit, hands-on pedagogy when introducing students to graduate-level genres of academic writing (the abstract, the lit review, the book review, the grant proposal, the conference paper, etc.)