Supporting Graduate Student Writing

My recent presentation to Spark, University of Lethbridge Teaching Symposium, entitled "Supporting Graduate Student Writing in a Thesis and Dissertation" is now available on SlideShare.

The talk covers roughly the same material as my 32-page guide, "Writing Strategies for Theses and Dissertations", except this time from the point of view of thesis/dissertation supervisors. I am trying to make supervisors understand that it is not enough to support graduate students through the literature review, proposal, research methods selection, data collection, and data analysis, but that they must also explicitly provide instruction in thesis-writing. All too often, a student successfully completes all their graduate coursework, their thesis proposal, data collection and analysis, and then suddenly the support from the advisor dries up as they say, "great, now run along and write that all up" as if writing a thesis were not as problematic as every other step. My basic argument is that graduate students have to unlearn the writing strategies that made them successful term paper writers and undergraduate graduates, and must now learn an entirely new and different set of writing skills to master the writing strategies required for any sustained piece of writing.

My presentation to the Sparks Symposium seemed to go over very well, and my online version of the presentation received fifty-hits the first week, so pleased with the initial reception. Hopefully, the presentation will continue to gain some momentum, because unless the problem is recognized and addressed by supervisors, we will continue to see a 50% attrition rate among graduate students in thesis and dissertation route programs.

If you do download or review the presentation, make sure to read the "notes" section as well, as the notes include some of my verbal commentary not on the slides.