Graduate writers work in a digital world where the context of research and the writing of research filter constantly and instantly through social media and generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), raising the complexity and stakes of communicating science, healthcare, law, and social work. The margin for error seems slimmer than ever and the resulting stress and duress can negatively impact our bodies, minds, relationships, work, academic programs, career plans, institutions, patients or clients, and professions. Well-intentioned institutional attempts to address these concerns often place the burden of care on individuals through our personal selection of certain self-care practices and programs, which don't always explicitly center the possibility that “self-care can be collective care” (Kearns, 2021, p. 224).

Learn more about how self-care can be collaborative way of belonging as a graduate writer in response to current institutional notions of wellbeing by looking at the following resources:

• Getting to the Heart of Science Communication, Chapter 9: Self Care and Collective Care, by Faith Kearns. Borrow through HSHSL. 
• The Nap Ministry: Rest is Resistance. 
• Learning from the Lived Experiences of Graduate Student Writers, Shannon Madden, Michele Eodice, Kirsten T. Edwards, & Alexandria Lockett, Eds. Borrow through HSHSL. 

Navigating these challenges, graduate students also must read and write ourselves into certain scholarly and professional ways of thinking, being, and belonging to be recognized as science practitioners, healthcare providers, lawyers and legal scholars, social workers, etc., while attempting to prepare for an often unstable job market marked by “scarcity, contingency, overloads, corporatization, and labor exploitation” (CCCC, Statement, 2019).

Learn more about how professional training relates to writing and reading in today’s economic environment by looking at the following resources:

• Badenhorst, C., Amell, B., & Burford, J. (2021). Re-Imagining Doctoral Writing 
• Brooks Gillies et al. (Eds). Graduate Writing Across the Disciplines
• CCCC. (2019). CCCC Statement of Professional Guidance for Mentoring Graduate Students
• Madden, S. Eodice, M., Edwards, K. T., & Lockett, A. (Eds). (2020). Learning from the Lived Experiences of Graduate Student Writers. Borrow through HSHSL. 
• U.S Department of Labor. (2024). CareerOneStop: Your source for career exploration, training, and jobs

These conditions can drive expectations for a clear-cut, linear path from novice to degreed professional through grit, hard work, and productivity–all abstract concepts experienced differently by graduate writers and dependent on many personal, social, and institutional factors. Thinking of our graduate experience as a singular and narrow effort necessarily hinges much of our success on how much writing we can produce and not only evades questions of quality but of personal fulfillment and a “nuanced and mobile understanding of learning and progression - as fluid, evolving, and multi-directional” (Gravett, 2020). Alternatively, we can think of our experience as plural and diverse “journeyings” (Taylor & Adams, 2019) that present to us a more ecological understanding of our graduate learning—one that values “twists and turns, dead ends, and red herrings” over the need to merely produce research and written work (Gravett, 2020).

Learn more about how narratives of writing productivity complicate and even hinder graduate students’ progress by looking at the resources below: 

• Badenhorst, C., Amell, B., & Burford, J. (2021). Re-Imagining Doctoral Writing 
• Brooks Gillies et al. (Eds). Graduate Writing Across the Disciplines
• Daniel (2020) on burnout
• Gravett (2020) on reimagining the doctoral degree
• Prieto (2024) on productivity (blog) 

Of course, our progress as graduate writers requires a lot of advanced disciplinary writing across a very short timeline. By viewing our written work as “an object of learning and development as opposed to solely an end-product” (Gravett, 2020), we can understand ourselves as writers developing the practices for strategically navigating the non-linear and complex processes for writing as graduate students and professionals. As writers, we spend our time giving, receiving, and interpreting feedback, reading and discussing with our mentors models to learn how to write in certain disciplinary genres, and revising and rewriting draft after draft of our work. None of this suggests a solo linear path for our research and writing production. Instead, much of what we produce depends on others, including mentors, publishers, and co-authors. The hiccups, delays, and dead ends abound, and they require strategic practices that help us demystify these variances and develop approaches to learning and producing knowledge attuned to the surprises, joys, and variability of graduate writing.

Learn more about strategic approaches to graduate research and writing by looking at the resources below:

• Badenhorst, C., Amell, B., & Burford, J. (2021). Re-Imagining Doctoral Writing 
• Brooks Gillies et al. (Eds). Graduate Writing Across the Disciplines
• Caplan & Johns (2022) Rhetorical Planning Wheel.
• CCCC Statement of Professional Guidance for Mentoring Graduate Students (2019)
• Clary-Lemon, Mueller, & Pantelides. (2022). Try This: Research Methods for Writers 
• Rose & McClafferty (2001)
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