: "GRADUATE STUDENT WRITING: SWC Writing Workshop

: "GRADUATE STUDENT WRITING

At the Sweetland Writing Center, faculty offer skillful, supportive advice to graduate writers as they draft their course papers, projects, and theses. We act as an interested outside audience, ask intelligent questions, direct students to resources, and give specific suggestions about organization, flow, evidence, clarity, grammar and style. Our aim is to help writers become more confident, skilled, and knowledgeable about writing and the subjects they write about.
Why do graduate students need such advice and support? Writing for graduate faculty, dissertation committees, and potential funders and employers can be daunting, even for students who are already good writers. The newness and complexity of advanced material may result in tangled sentences, unarticulated ideas, and grammatical confusion that is often incorrectly judged as 'poor writing ability,' 'poor thinking ability,' 'low motivation,' or 'poor preparation.'
Writers who are working in their second, third, or fourth languages may find their knowledge of grammar and syntax eroding as they engage with complex ideas. Mid-career professionals have been out of school for years, perhaps writing for other audiences and purposes, perhaps not writing much at all.
Even when graduate students write with confidence and skill, they may run into trouble when the w"