Sustainable writing for graduate students: writing retreats offer vital support

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article describes the effects of sequential non-residential writing retreats on graduate students the development of sustainable writing practices in the latter stages of writing theses and dissertations. Our study looks to understand how graduate students implement techniques of academic writing productivity. We collected data from three short, non-residential graduate student writing retreats in 2017. The retreats were hosted by a research support programme at a large public university in the United States (U.S.). We used a qualitative case study design and employed grounded theory. We analysed participant responses on exit evaluations and in interviews about their experiences in one or more retreats. Graduate students who participated in more than one retreat within a year expressed feelings of greater writing confidence and productivity, thus, exhibiting of the value of non-residential retreats to student thesis and dissertation writing processes. We found many graduate students have difficulty post-retreat maintaining writing habits. Our findings concur with existing studies about the benefits of retreats for academic writing productivity and expand on those studies to note that graduate student researchers can benefit from attending multiple retreats to build and sustain a regular writing practice among their campus community of writers.