Make an Appointment
with an Interdisciplinary Writing Consultant

The Interdisciplinary Writing Consultants offer one-on-one tutoring to all graduate students. The consultants operate within three dimensions, helping graduate students in the following ways: 

Cross-disciplinary genre expectations

  • Understand how scholars develop content or subject matter in ways that meet the expectations of their research community
  • Outline and organize their manuscripts or thesis/dissertation chapters
  • Articulate the significance of research topics to field
  • Critically evaluate literature and integrate sources to appropriately situate research topics within the literature in the field
  • Define and justify a guiding framework
  • Describe research methods in a clear and credible way
  • Report and interpret research results effectively, developing warranted take-home messages and creating effective, visualizations of statistically analyzed data
  • Frame, position, and weigh propositions in a coherent discussion
  • Articulate the value and contribution of their study to the field
  • Critically evaluate and refine their research writing according to research writing expectations
  • Understand the organization, communicative goals, and writing strategies of research genres (e.g., research articles, thesis/dissertations, conference abstracts, proceedings papers)

Scholarly communication conventions

  • Differentiate between writing for journal publications, theses/dissertations, and grant proposal writing (e.g., research articles share very specific communicative goals and strategies for developing scientific arguments, some of which are similar to other research genres and some are different)
  • Understand the scope, aims, audience, and quality of journals and identify appropriate publication venues
  • Understand ethical issues in scholarly writing and publishing
  • Understand the expectations of co-authorship
  • Understand manuscript submission requirements, peer-review process, and expectations of responding to reviewers

Academic and professional development

  • Identify academic writing conventions using scholarly writing resources
  • Locate literature relevant to students’ research focus using library search engines and resources
  • Effectively use writing technologies for (e.g., RWT, electronic collections of texts, search engines for linguistic data)