Date of Award

5-11-2025

Date Published

June 2025

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Department

Writing Studies, Rhetoric and Composition

Advisor(s)

Patrick Berry

Keywords

Curriculum Development;Graduate Student;Pedagogy;Rhetorical Genre Theory;Writing Process;Writing Studies

Subject Categories

Arts and Humanities | Rhetoric and Composition

Abstract

My dissertation studies graduate students and how we teach them disciplinary writing conventions. Following the work of rhetorical genre theorists such as Catherine F. Schryer and Caroline R. Miller, I question how our mainstay academic genres in graduate school influence writing habits and the extent to which they are incommensurate with disciplinary genre expectations and the workload of faculty. I believe studying graduate students as writers is an ironically underexamined area of research in Rhetoric, Composition, and Writing Studies (RCWS)—a field committed to undergraduate writing. The data in this dissertation comes from a large national study that I distributed to 67 universities in the United States. I received 289 completed responses from both faculty and graduate students from a broad spectrum of writing related fields. 203 responses—those who identified being in RCWS or allied fields—were coded for analysis using grounded theory. I use storytelling and phenomenology to illustrate many diverse embodied experiences of learning to write. Additionally, I completed 23 one-on-one interviews and include profiles, transcripts, and dialogue in this manuscript. In this dissertation, I identify broad themes for analysis to understand the systematic problem of teaching graduate students to write. Some of the major themes indicate that graduate students largely learn to write outside of the classroom, they value practicing relevant genres, their relationship with faculty mentors is crucial, the importance of learning by doing, and many more. Through these themes, I explore the relationship between graduate student writing pedagogy and the field of RCWS by reflecting on both my own experience and the data shared with me by my participants. I derive pedagogical interventions from the data and make suggestions on how to value writing processes in the classroom and beyond. Inspired by the Indigenous scholar Shawn Wilson and his framework for relational accountability, I broaden our examination of graduate student enculturation to attend not only to writing and writing processes but to the relational—the relationships between our embodied identities as writers and disciplinary genre expectations, the relationships between graduate students and faculty. This is me advocating for a more sustained conversation about how to do the labor of the academic writer.

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