Faculty Writing Groups

Writing groups can provide enormous support for your writing over time. Having a group of colleagues you meet with on a consistent basis can keep you on track, productive, and continually developing and progressing on your scholarly projects. Writing groups are also a powerful tool for developing interdisciplinary relationships, learning about the often fascinating work of your colleagues, and providing support for you as a teacher, scholar, and individual.

Writing groups can also:

• Promote attention to audience and writing as a process, a set of stages or building blocks that we all go through
• Allow you to hear your work out loud and let you see the effects of your writing on real (but supportive) readers
• Encourage you to focus on both readers' and writer's needs
• Help you develop strategies for responding to others' work
• Affirm (and sometimes challenges) assumptions about what makes good writing in your field
• Promote substantive rethinking/re-seeing texts
• Re-ignite interest in and commitment to projects
• Help you gain perspective and build confidence
• Enable you to learn discourse conventions in other disciplines
• Counteract the isolation inherent in much of scholarly and creative work
• Support ongoing productivity
• Provide immediate feedback, as well as feedback in the context of previous drafts and projects
• Remind us of what our students go through when we assign them writing

If you are interested in participating in a writing group, contact the Center for Writing Excellence director, Dr. Jonathan Rylander. He will be compiling a list of interested faculty. Also, consider coming to a Faculty Writing Support Program Retreat where you can meet other faculty who might be interested in starting a group.