How to Attract Graduate Writers? One Center’s Turbulent Attempts to Reach New Heights

Writing Center scholars disagree about how to tutor graduate writers. Some suggest encouraging graduate writers to bring smaller writing projects, such as coursework, grants, articles, etc. to the center instead of the larger thesis or dissertation projects (Mannon, 2016). Some argue that a focus on sentence-level issues is acceptable because writing in graduate school is tied firmly to identity (Mannon, 2016; Cirillo-McCarthy, Del Russo, & Leahy, 2016 ). Still others argue that tutors working with graduate writers need to be more aware of the differences between the genres of undergraduate writing and those of graduate writing (Summer, 2016 ; Vorhies, 2015). No matter the approach, however, they all agree that graduate writers benefit from interaction with their campus writing center. At the Kent State Writing Commons, we see a fair number of graduate students in both face-to-face and online sessions. However, we know there are far more out there who are not seeking our assistance, far more who may be struggling through the sometimes darkened skies of the writing process without the beacon light of a writing tutor trained to guide them through a successful flight. Thus, in the 2017-2018 academic year, we started a project with a focus on attracting more graduate students to our center. This presentation will provide our narrative of our own attempts to soar to new heights tutoring graduate writers. We will also invite the narratives of others and hopefully begin a local discussion of best practices we can each feel comfortable engaging in our home centers