Darby Vickers, Ph.D.

I presented “Writing for Philosophy Graduate Students” on the Minorities and Philosophy (MAP) panel at the Eastern APA (January 9, 2019). Below, I provide a short description of impetus for this presentation. I also address some of the reasons that philosophy departments would benefit from a similar writing workshop.

“Writing dysfunction” is rampant in academia. In the 1980s and 1990s, Robert Boice conducted seminal studies that empirically demonstrated the prevalence of writing dysfunction and tested interventions to improve productivity. Beyond the social science research, there is now a huge market of academic books aiming to teach academics how to improve their writing process and productivity.. However, there is not a single book that I’ve been able to find for philosophical writing at the graduate or professional level (although there are many manuals for undergraduates). Moreover, philosophical writing differs both from writing in other humanities disciplines and from writing in the social sciences. This means that widely-acclaimed books like How to Write Your Journal Article in 12 Weeks and other similar manuals are difficult to adjust for philosophical writing. Thus, there are few if any easily accessible resources online for graduate students about how to learn how to write in philosophy.

This is a particular problem because undergraduate philosophy classes often require short papers focusing only on texts assigned in the course. This typical undergraduate format differs radically from the standarg graduate writing assignment: a 12-20 page research paper. Moreover, many graduate programs do not include a writing course. Given inadequate training, graduate students are often told their writing isn’t up to standard. However, most of these graduate students never receive concrete advice on how to fix it. This problem disproportionately affects graduate students who come  groups historically underrepresented in graduate programs in philosophy, and, as a consequence, these student sometimes have less encouragement from faculty. Additionally, these historically underrepresented groups may have more difficulty reaching out for help because they already feel like they are impostors in their chosen field.

I struggled to learn how to write graduate seminar papers. It took an incredible amount of practice (and useful feedback) for my writing to improve. By the time I started my dissertation, I had learned to write a decent philosophy paper. Yet, the stress of the candidacy process demonstrated to me that something needed to change about the way that I managed my time, so that I would survive the process of producing a full dissertation. I started tentatively reaching out to friends and reading blogs about time management. Nothing I found was working for me, until a friend pointed me toward Professor Barbara Sarnecka’s Writing Workshop. Prof. Sarnecka is a psychologist and cognitive scientist, and her syllabus attempts to build skills to benefit mental health and to foster community.  

The  syllabus was designed by Dr. Barbara Sarnecka, a professor of psychology and cognitive science at UCI. Prof. Sarnecka has been running this writing workshop successfully for years. She has written a book from her experience in the workshop that now serves as the textbook for the workshop. She has published the first eight chapters of the book for free online (https://sarneckalab.blogspot.com/2018/07/writing-workshop-table-of-contents.html). The book includes advice for writing, scheduling, creating a mentally healthy community around writing, and how to survive and thrive in graduate school.

I spoke to Prof. Sarnecka about modifying the syllabus for philosophy students. She was delighted that the syllabus might help graduate students beyond the social sciences, but she was unsure how to modify the syllabus herself. She is a passionate advocate for graduate student well-being based on her own experience as a graduate student in the social sciences. The writing workshop, which she runs every quarter at UCI is her attempt to improve the life of graduate students in the social sciences.

I believe that a modified version of Prof. Sarnecka’s syllabus might be extremely helpful (both to teach graduate school coping skills and philosophical writing techniques), although philosophy departments may want to design their own syllabi that use similar components. I would love to share this with other philosophers and brainstorm methods for improving mental health and increasing writing productivity for philosophy graduate students. I have started putting together a version of it (here), but this project is in it’s early stages.
[[Please feel free to provide feedback on what I have, either by leaving a comment here or by emailing me]]

I think that a writing workshop is an important component of graduate curriculum design in philosophy departments and, ideally, such a workshop should teach both philosophy writing skills and those skills necessary to be a productive academic. Moreover, the writing workshop provides a communal space for graduate students to talk about writing (and it’s difficulties). Graduate school is extremely isolating– especially in the humanities where we generally tend to publish as single authors (rather than working in teams). Philosophy tends to be particularly isolating, perhaps because it is difficult to discuss philosophy with non-philosophers (even if they are other academics). In addition, philosophy is uniquely (at least among the humanities) bereft of resources on writing for graduate students.