Special issue on writing center support for graduate thesis and dissertation writers.

Lawrence, Susan ; Zawacki, Terry Myers

This special issue extends the conversation, well underway, on writing center support for graduate student writers. As guest editors, we wanted to contribute to that conversation with articles that address both individual tutorials and alternative models for supporting graduate student writers. The articles here invoke institutional perspectives on partnerships and resources and the need to foster long-term habits of writing and peer collaboration. Absent from these themes is that of writing center support for multilingual graduate students, a topic rich and complex enough to warrant its own special Issue.

Supporting graduate student writers--whether English LI or L2--calls for alliances among writing programs and other disciplinary units. Laura Brady and Nathalie Singh-Corcoran trace their writing center/WAC partnership and provide a heuristic for planning and managing change when a center is awarded funding to provide dedicated support for graduate student writers. Having secured funding, administrators must determine the most effective ways to allocate resources. Kristina Reardon, Tom Deans, and Cheryl Maykel describe their center's efforts to enhance the quality of graduate writers' individual tutoring sessions as well as to develop "just write" programming that reaches larger numbers of students.

While centers may initiate "just write" programs, these can evolve into productive student-led efforts, as our third article shows. The co-authors' goal in this research-based account of how and why their engineering writing group functions effectively is to help writing centers consider how they might lay a foundation for similar self-sustaining writing support. In the Tutors' Column, generalist graduate tutors Paul Barron and Louis Cicciarelli describe story-telling and mapping strategies they have used successfully with dissertation writers in an eight-week dissertation-writing institute.

Susan Lawrence and Terry Myers Zawacki

George Mason University

Fairfax, Virginia