Category: Academic Writing

What I Learned about Writing a Dissertation through the Retreat

Laura Detmering

I would like to begin this post by echoing what Barrie says in her post. Like Barrie, I have worked as an Assistant Director in U of L’s Writing Center since the fall of 2010, and I am sad to leave this space for many reasons, most of which is the community of people who have supported me as I work on my own dissertation. This community includes not only the incredible staff of the Writing Center, but also the various individuals I have worked with as a consultant, all of whom have taught me a great deal about writing. It has been a pleasure to be a part of this Writing Center, and I could not choose a better way to end my experience as an Assistant Director than by working at the Dissertation Writing Retreat.

Every day last week, I watched a group of ten dedicated Ph.D. candidates enter the Writing Center, select a table or other writing space and write for several hours, taking few breaks and simply committing to the process. Participating in this retreat taught me a lot about writing a dissertation, and it also reinforced much of what I already knew. First, and probably most obvious, the retreat reminded me that no two people approach the process in the same way, so it is important to measure your success only against yourself and not others. For one person, success might be drafting a solid paragraph in a day, whereas for another, success might mean drafting four to six pages in a day. Of course, no one can write an entire dissertation in a week, and, fortunately, no one tried. Instead, each individual participating in the retreat set realistic, achievable goals, and I think most people met them (and I met my own goals, sitting in my office, writing while the participants were writing).

Probably the most important thing I learned during the retreat, though, is the importance of having a community of people to write your dissertation alongside. This community can be fairly diverse. For instance, I consulted with a Ph.D. candidate in Mechanical Engineering and a Ph.D. candidate in the Humanities. Because both of these individuals are in different fields from one another and from me, much of our time was spent discussing their individual projects, with each of them explaining to one another and to me what kind of research they are doing, how dissertations are constructed in their fields, and how they as writers were approaching the process. On Thursday, I led a workshop on overcoming obstacles to writing a dissertation, and as a group, everyone participating in the retreat discussed some obstacles that were arising and how to approach them. One of the suggestions I made at that time, which I personally have found beneficial in writing my own dissertation, is to try to explain your project to a person outside your field of study. By doing this, we are forced to think very carefully about what we are trying to do and how best to articulate our ideas to others. Thus, this community of people to write your dissertation alongside does not necessarily have to be just other Ph.D. candidates, but it can include anyone in your life—a parent, a child, a spouse, a sibling, a friend, etc.

For me, personally, watching a group of ten people sit and write or discuss their dissertations for eight hours a day pushed me to work on my own dissertation. Having a community of people who are also writing dissertations to meet with and discuss your work is also beneficial, then. I would encourage anyone who is writing a dissertation or a thesis or really any piece of writing to develop a similar community, a group of people who make you feel accountable to them, as well as to yourself. Seeing other people writing (and struggling) along with you is powerful and motivating in a way that writing in isolation cannot be. Certainly, there are times when we have to find space by ourselves to write, and doing so has a value of its own, but having a community of people to engage with, even if that engagement is silent, while writing a dissertation, is important.

How the Dissertation Writing Retreat Helped Me to See Writing Center Work in a New Light

Barrie Olson

I’ve been thinking about Writing Center work a lot lately. I attribute this reflection to two events. First, this past week marked my last week working in the University Writing Center at the University of Louisville. It is hard to believe that my two years as Assistant Director (along with Laura Detmering) have come to an end. For both of us, the Writing Center has been a second home. More importantly, our work in the Writing Center has significantly impacted the work we do as both teachers and researchers of writing. There is, however, a second reason for all this reflecting. After two years of Writing Center work, it wasn’t until this past week that I saw, really, truly saw, just how powerful the work we do in the Writing Center can be.

I should, of course, back up briefly and say that I have always felt that Writing Center work is both important and effective. In fact, I even wrote a blog post about it. Rarely, however, are we as consultants given the opportunity to see Writing Center work in its most idealized form. If consultants are lucky, they may work with the same student several times on the same paper. Really lucky consultants might see the same student throughout an entire semester working on multiple projects. What’s great about either of these scenarios is that they let us see the effects of our work. How do students implement the feedback we give them? How do ideas that manifested themselves during writing center consultations then appear in reiterations of the student’s writing? What might we do to better serve this student in the future? When you see the same client multiple times, you can begin to answer these questions and reflect on not only the work you do as a consultant, but also on the effectiveness of that work. Unfortunately, more often than not, writing consultations don’t extend past a single visit. Students might seek feedback for only one draft or come to the Writing Center to discuss writing in only one of their disciplines. While these sessions are no doubt fruitful, as consultants, we can only imagine what the students did when they got home and returned to their writing.

I have been a consultant for both kinds of sessions. I have been left to wonder whether I had been helpful to a student. And I have been able to see just how helpful I’ve been to students. But it wasn’t until last week, during University Writing Center’s first ever Dissertation Writing Retreat, that I was able to see just how powerful Writing Center work, in its most idealized form, can be. The Dissertation Writing Retreat was a week-long intensive writing experience for ten doctoral candidates representing five different disciplines on campus. Participants came in at 8:00 AM each day and would write for approximately 2.5 hours. They would also engage in workshops covering relevant topics such as writing a literature review or overcoming writing obstacles. Then, after a break for lunch, participants would return to writing for about another 1.5 hours before meeting with a writing consultant (like me). Consultations lasted an hour and participants met with the same consultant each day. You can begin to see here how this experience represented ideal writing center work.

First, we had time. An hour is a lot of time to discuss someone’s writing. More time is always great, but an hour gives you time to read the writing, discuss the writing, and, if the participant so desires, begin rewriting. But this is just a logistical advantage. The other advantages spoke to some of the theories of Writing Center work that I never necessarily got to see in action. For example, a common conversation in writing center scholarship revolves around discipline-specific tutors versus general tutors. While discipline-specific tutors are able, often, to speak to the content of a student’s writing, general tutors may be more limited in that area. General tutors offer the advantage, however, of needing the student writer to explain his or her content to a reader unfamiliar with the discipline. In an ideal world, the process of explaining content makes the content more clear not only to the tutor but to the student herself. In explaining the information to someone not already familiar with the content, the student might be forced to think about her content in new ways. If nothing else, she will likely have to make connections within her content far more explicit than she might with someone who is already familiar with it. And, while this all sounded good in theory, for me as a consultant, it was sometimes hard to know if it was true.

Enter the retreat. On the final day of the retreat, participants shared with one another some of the benefits from participating in the retreat. One benefit that came up repeatedly regarded just how helpful it was for them to have to talk about their projects to people outside their fields. Each participant remarked on how such conversations clarified their understanding of their projects and, by association, how they wrote about those projects.

Gaining a stronger testimony in the power of the general tutor was only the beginning. I also was able to see just what can happen when someone gets feedback on their writing not only the same day they wrote it but also on a consistent basis (in this case, daily). I had the privilege of working with two doctoral candidates from the Kent School of Social Work. Each day, we were able to meet and discuss the progress they had made. After each session, we would set goals for the following session. They would then be able to spend time writing knowing that they had goals in mind and that we would be discussing these goals. This isn’t to say that the sessions were prescriptive. At the end of the day, my job was to help these participants in whatever capacity they needed me in. However, setting goals like these meant that each day, we could start the conversation by reviewing what we had done the day before and by seeing how they had progressed based on that previous work. For the participants, this proved to be an important aspect of the retreat. Many commented on the fact that these daily sessions helped them stay on task and motivated. They were also able to discuss their writing when it was still fresh. If a consultant asked them why they made a specific choice in their writing, for instance, they probably could remember why.

But for me as a consultant, the experience was equally as valuable as it was for participants. I was able to see almost immediately which strategies I used as a consultant were working and which ones needed to be adjusted or abandoned altogether. Moreover, these strategies shifted from one participant to the next. In other words, the reflection I did as a writing consultant, while often generalizable, was also specific to the individual participant. By seeing these participants every day, I know that by the end of the week, I was a better consultant than when I started. I would like to think that during my tenure as a Writing Center tutor, I have always improved but it is hard to know for sure. Only with daily reflection in relation to a returning participant was I able to feel certain about the ways I was being either effective or ineffective.

There are certainly other ways that being a consultant during the retreat affected my views on Writing Center work but many have been, or will be, expressed by others. For example, Dr. Bronwyn Williams, Director of the University Writing Center, has already discussed some of the great things we saw come out of the retreat. Likewise, it is my hope that both participants and consultants from the retreat will be motivated to comment or write blog posts of their own. For now, let me simply end by saying this: Writing Center work works. If you don’t believe me, ask Naouel Baili, Tanvir Bhuiyan, Brynn Dombroski, LeAnn Bruce, Alex Cambron, Anis Hamdi, James Leary, Mohammadreza Negahdar, Zdravko Salipur, or Charlos Thompson—our retreat participants. Or, talk to one of the consultants: Ashly, Bender, Robin Blackett, Laura Detmering, Becky Hallman, or Jennifer Marciniak. While I am sure we all had different experiences, I am also certain that we each took something positive away from this week. While my time in the Writing Center is now up, I look forward to seeing what the future brings to the University Writing Center. My hope is that the kind of work that happened there this past week will continue and that both new clients and new consultants will have the opportunity, like I did, to see writing center work in its idealized form. It’s empowering.

Who is a Writer?

Lauren Dimmer

Today I woke up the way I normally do: too late in the afternoon and too tired for anything but a good cup of coffee. I stumbled my way into my living room, slumped down by the window, and stared at my computer with the kind of hatred usually reserved for mass murderers or bad rainstorms on the highway.

I’ve been trying to write something creative every day for the last five years.

It’s not going so well.

Obviously.

For the last five years of my life, every day starts with a big list of all the reasons that I really shouldn’t be writing. My slacks from work need to be washed, my new kitten needs her medicine to help get over some random fungus, the floor’s dirty, articles really need reading for school, my girlfriend’s getting over a root canal and needs me to make another smoothie so she can have breakfast, I need to check my facebook feed, I need to check the news.

Of course writing is hard. Of course writing is exhausting. But this morning, I started thinking: what is it, exactly, that’s burrowing into my brain whenever I reach for a pen and a keyboard?

The more I thought about it, the more complicated it became. For example: what do I really mean when I say that writing is hard? I write probably three e-mails every morning, and none of those bother me. I text my friends. I comment on some blog posts. None of that writing makes me grind my teeth the way my daily creative exercises do. I don’t try to do the laundry just to have an excuse to avoid updating my status on facebook. I don’t sweep the floor to avoid e-mailing my friends.  Is it the kind of writing I’m doing that’s so hard? What makes writing a story harder than responding to a blog post? When you’re writing a story, you can write anything you want. You can make whatever kind of sense you want, too. It’s the kind of freedom that should make you feel inspired and happy, but I still feel trapped as ever.

I think, ultimately, some of the most damaging baggage we have to shoulder whenever we try to write is really baggage about writers.

Think about it: we’re taught that “real writers” are sad, solitary, lonely creatures. “Real writers” are geniuses. Real writers are tortured. Real writers are quirky and original. Real writers drink whiskey every morning. Maybe the worst thing we’re taught about “real writers” is the way that they can just dash out an absolutely perfect first draft. I never heard about Hemingway slaving away over a single paragraph for five hours while his laundry got dirtier and dirtier. I never heard about Oscar Wilde having to practice whenever he wanted to write a new, brilliant play. They just did it, those guys, their talent was innate and spooky and hard to understand; they had a mysterious, weird, natural link to whatever “good art” was, and it just poured out of them whenever they needed it.
The end.

I write my first draft and it is crap. I write my second draft and it is also crap. I pour another cup of coffee. I write a third draft. Still crap. I sweep the floor. I talk to my girlfriend. I go to a movie. I am still working on a poem I wrote when I was sixteen years old. That poem? Crap!

And every time I do this, I make a list of why writing is stupid, and I am stupid, and I can never, never ever be a real writer. Every day, this list gets longer and longer. That list is what’s pressing into me whenever I stop and grab a few extra minutes and pick up a pen and try, try, try to write something. Anything.

But you know what? Just because no one ever bothered to tell me Hemingway went through fifty versions of “Hills Like White Elephants” doesn’t mean that he never practiced all the ways to make a tight, crystalline, tiny image in his text. Hemingway practiced. Oscar Wilde practiced. Every piece of creative work you read is just the latest draft in a huge army of incredibly crappy drafts, and maybe, if we saw some of those drafts, we wouldn’t feel so bad when our first version doesn’t measure up. Maybe studying those drafts would tell us more about writing than reading everything when it’s all perfect and polished and beautiful.

But even if you don’t believe all that, I’d like you to try to believe this, okay?

A writer is a person who writes. That’s what writer means. That’s all writer means.
The only way you’ll never ever be a real writer is if you let all those “real writers” keep you from writing.

And I have a poem to write.

Again.


Invisible Lines

Mark Williams

I dropped composition 102 two—maybe three—times in college. I did finally complete it in my last semester. It was “take comp or don’t graduate”: I took comp. But even then, it turned out to be the worst grade of my college career, by about an entire grade.

The first time I took the class, at community college, I stayed in almost the entire semester, but at some point halfway through I quit turning in the assignments. The turning point was a long “article summary” that the teacher gave me a D on, some article by a scientist named John Polkinghorne. (It bothered me enough that I’ve remembered, apparently.) I thought I understood the article, I thought I’d written a summary, and the teacher simply said (over and over) that I “had not summarized the article.” I couldn’t get any farther than that with him. So when he began giving small assignment after small assignment and telling us that they would be “helpful,” I no longer trusted him—I’d already decided that he was not helpful, so why would his assignments be helpful? I quit turning things in, then dropped the class on the last possible date.

The next time I took composition, I walked out halfway through the first class. I had some important reasons: first, he called the writing process “percolating,” a really obnoxious metaphor for people like me who hated coffee. I still smell that bitter coffee smell when I picture his classroom. Second, he was using his percolating metaphor to justify a mountain of assignments that I thought were way overboard for a simple gen. ed. requirement. I don’t like coffee and I don’t like being overworked in a gen. ed., so I walked out before he’d finished the syllabus. I picked up stellar astronomy instead.

I arrived at the last semester of college, finally forced to take ENG 102. I felt dragged along, alternately insulted and embarrassed by what I was learning, until the final paper when we were required to have a tutoring session at the writing center. I remember my writing center tutor was a girl I’d gone to junior high with named Courtney, and how much it embarrassed me to be “asking” for help on an English 102 paper from someone I wanted to view as an equal. But I didn’t see much choice, and Courtney was quiet, and thoughtful, and patient, and helpful—and forty-five minutes later I was walking out of the library into the cold Chicago air with a new blue pencil and the uncomfortable realization that I could’ve been a lot better student, and a lot better writer, than I would now be as a college graduate. I felt as if an opportunity had been there, and I was too late to make good on it.

That was nine years ago this month. I still feel the almost infuriating helplessness I felt in those moments—moments when I knew there was something I could not do but needed to do, something just on the other side of a paper-thin curtain. The causes of those impotent moments can be different—in my stories I can see circumstances, a teacher’s failure, my laziness and my pride all getting in the way; for other people it can be language barriers, or educational differences, or a language disorder. But in all those cases writing doesn’t work like other skills. It’s not like basketball, where we always can see that we’re missing our shots or dribbling the ball off our foot or just getting beaten by bigger, faster, stronger players. Oftentimes, success and failure in writing operate along invisible lines for those of us who are failing. As a writing tutor and teacher—a “success”—I have to say that the lines haven’t really gotten more visible. They’re more strongly felt, I want to say—but then again, I felt my failures as a writer so deeply back then, too. I think it comes down to this, for all of us: we may not be able to recognize what’s going on in our writing, but we do acquire a “feel” as writers. Good feelings, but bad feelings too, feelings that make writing impossible, undesirable, beyond us. If I’m right, then we need to work to pay attention to the forceful, invisible lines writing continually bumps us up against. And trust that everyone else feels them too.