Writing Together: Building Social Writing Opportunities for Graduate Students

Writing Together: Building Social Writing Opportunities for Graduate Students, edited by Rachael Cayley, Fiona Coll, and Daniel Aureliano Newman

In recent years, graduate writing programs have increasingly paid attention to the benefits of writing initiatives that harness the power of peer presence, interaction, and collectivity. These social-by-design writing initiatives—which could be boot camps, writing groups, write-alongs, retreats, peer review sessions, or show-up-and-write gatherings—rely on two central contentions: that graduate writers need support with the practical challenges of writing productivity and that writing alongside others can be a transformative experience for graduate writers. Social writing opportunities offer uniquely dynamic environments in which graduate students can develop their writing processes.

This forthcoming volume will include accounts from graduate writing professionals about how social writing programs are imagined and delivered. Its goal is to survey the motivations, rationales, and structures that underpin these initiatives in order to create a practical resource for writing professionals who need to establish or refine their own offerings. Writing Together will be less interested in presenting “how to” approaches and more interested in presenting “how we” accounts that will allow readers to learn from the creative programming of others. To capture a range of experiences, institutional models, and forms of social writing support, this book will offer fifteen chapters that explain the thinking behind social writing initiatives and the processes through which those initiatives have been assessed.

This volume will be the first in a new series from the Consortium on Graduate Communication and the University of Michigan Press.