Graduate Student Writing Center Services

One-on-One Consultations

One-on-one consultations are great at any point in the writing process. From brainstorming to polishing for submission, our consultants are trained to help students prepare, develop, and present their work. Students can meet with a consultant to discuss projects ranging from seminar papers to poster presentations. The consultants are prepared to work with students across disciplines on a variety of projects.

Time Management & Creating a Productivity System Workshop

The dynamics of the graduate school workload are unique, and it is often a challenge to integrate academic demands into the rest of life. This workshop gives you tools to thrive during graduate school by providing time management techniques to increase efficiency, plan effectively, and achieve work-life balance. It will also touch on reading and notetaking strategies to help manage your class workload as productively as painlessly as possible.

Introduction to Graduate Research Papers Workshop

Whether you are coming straight out of an undergraduate program, or are transitioning into graduate studies after time away, it can be unclear what distinguishes “graduate-level writing” from assignments that you may already be familiar with. This workshop will outline general expectations for graduate-level research-writing as well as introduce several tools and resources that you can use at different stages of your work.

Creating Writing Plans Workshop

With the added demands of graduate school, such as multiple simultaneous writing assignments in numerous courses, theses, qualifying exams and dissertations, prewriting strategies can make a huge difference in developing sustainable writing practices. In this webinar, learn about how developing a writing plan can help you tackle longer projects one step at a time, allowing you more time and attention for each part. We will discuss how this can be applied during coursework as well as during the more independent post-coursework phases.

Developing Research Questions Workshop

Even if you have clear research interests, developing a compelling, answerable research question can be challenging. Strong research questions both explain why it is important that they be answered, and set the stage for an organized research project/paper that answers them. This workshop will cover several brainstorming techniques for formulating research questions and will also introduce analytical tools for evaluating and refining research questions based on potential sources of evidence, existing scholarly conversations, and intended audiences.

The APA Paper Workshop

This webinar will provide an overview of writing papers using the APA (American Psychological Association) citation style, which is commonly used across disciplines such as social science, psychology, economics, business, and education. We will look at examples and provide tips for using APA to correctly format your paper, including overall structure, in-text citations, and bibliographies. The webinar will also provide additional resources to help you find the information you need for any future formatting or citation questions regarding APA. We will be using the most recent manual update, APA 7 (October 2019).

Writing Effective Thesis Statements

This webinar will address the dos and don’ts of creating an effective thesis statement for research papers and other writing projects. It includes introductions to and brief exercises on thesis writing, including brainstorming, refining your approach, elements to include, and pitfalls to avoid. Whether you’re new to graduate school or writing a dissertation, this webinar will offer tips and suggestions for honing your thesis-writing technique.

Introductions: Creating Research Space Workshop

For many incoming graduate students, the process of contextualizing their own work or ideas within an existing scholarly conversation can be daunting—even more so when they have to figure out how to introduce that context to an audience in a literature review or research paper. Our CARS (Creating a Research Space) workshop will introduce students to a transferable set of rhetorical moves that they can use whenever they must survey, analyze, and enter an ongoing discussion within their discipline.

Dissertation Proposals in the Humanities Workshop

You’ve finished your course work and passed qualifying exams – now what? This workshop will provide an overview of writing dissertation proposals in the Humanities. It will offer guidelines on the structure and essential sections of the proposal, such as questions to be addressed, methodology, and chapter overviews. The workshop will also provide insight on integrating your quals work into the proposal, as well as serving as a forum for questions on the dissertation proposal process.

Weekend Dissertation Bootcamps

Our weekend dissertation bootcamps are two days of structured writing blocks and breaks (using an adapted version of the Pomodoro method) with a working lunch that features a group conversation on the dissertation process. The main goals of bootcamps are to provide community space, increase productivity, and develop sustainable habits that participants can utilize after the event. Dissertation bootcamps fill this gap by providing both along with practices to help approach and complete long writing projects.