Scholarly Writing and Collaboration: A Book Review on Writing Groups for Doctoral Education and Beyond

Writing Groups for Doctoral Education and Beyond (Aitchison & Guerin, 2014) is a detailed text outlining collaborative writing pedagogies suitable for academics, doctoral students, and doctoral supervisors. It serves as a guide to "showcase the potential of writing groups for advanced academic writing by pulling together a unique mix of authors and scholarly approaches." (Aitchison, 2014, back cover). The book focuses on the real need for scholarly writing in academic life and addresses the trepidation felt by doctoral students and early career scholars for producing written, publishable work. For doctoral students completing the dissertation is a major hurdle and lacking confidence in writing can derail the process. For non-tenured academics, the pressure to publish alongside full workloads is a challenging proposition and writing generally happens outside of paid working hours. For supervisors of doctoral students, increased work demands and high advising numbers limits the capacity for strong supervisor-student relationships to develop throughout the dissertation process. It is in this context that the book offers guidelines to help increase writing productivity through various types of writing groups. The authors use the term "writing group" as a "generic term to refer to situations where two or more people come together to work on their writing in a sustained way, over repeated gatherings, for doing, discussing or sharing their writing for agreed purposes" (Aitchison, 2014, p. 7). A variety of different paradigms are critically interpreted within the writing group setting, which offers the reader a look inside the pedagogy and practice of writing. There are several key strengths to this text that include, pedagogical responses for increased writing productivity and the "push to publish," innovations for supporting academic writing quality, confidence and output, scaffolding the thesis writing process, new theoretical explorations of collaborative writing approaches, and writing group formulations. The text is divided into 15 chapters and these chapters are divided into a total of 3 sections. Section 1 titled, "Setting the Scene," is made up of the first 3 Chapters of the book. Chapter 1 focuses on introducing writing groups, pedagogy, theory and its relationship to practice. Chapter 2 outlines the historical background of writing groups in research education, and Chapter 3 presents a typology of writing groups that identifies characteristics of writing groups. By the end of Section 1, the reader is more acquainted with the relationship of writing groups to the academic setting and the key components that make writing groups successful. Section II, titled, "Theory and Reflection," focuses on the elements of creating and engaging in writing groups for doctoral students. This section is made up of Chapters 4-9. Chapter 4 launches into a discussion on the potential complexities that exist with multiple sources of feedback that doctoral students must negotiate within the context of their academic writing. Chapter 5 discusses the potential of writing groups to alleviate the barriers that doctoral students encounter throughout the dissertation process. Chapter 6 introduces the idea of doctoral students writing with their supervisors to breakdown the writing process, overcome barriers and interrupt hierarchies within higher education institutions. The author discusses this through the cognitive apprenticeship model in order to explore the exchange of ideas from supervisor to doctoral student in supporting the writing process. Chapter 7 focuses on writing retreats for doctoral students and explores how these experiences are translated from retreat to the real world. Students are encouraged to continue meeting in micro-groups after the structured retreats and the author explores the notion of coherence as a lens to understand student writing behaviors. Chapter 8 suggests that emotional and environmental conditions can aid the overall writing process. …