Peer writing groups

This chapter describes different kinds of writing groups and the roles they play in supplementing the feedback cycles between student and supervisors. It proposes that both critique-focused and productivity-focused writing groups provide rich and diverse opportunities for doctoral students to learn key academic practices through participating in authentic scholarly networks of exchange over writing. Critique-focused writing groups can be facilitated by institutional representatives, such as language experts and supervisors, or by peers. Critique-focused groups require significant commitment, since members need to commit to regular participation and invest additional time for reading and reviewing peers' work. Productivity-focused groups are a relatively new, and increasingly popular, model of writing group in which participants get together to write rather than to discuss their writing. For supervisors whose students belong to productivity-focused writing groups, the main benefit is that their candidates are generating text.