Abdul Qawi Noori
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Abdul Qawi Noori is an educator and PhD researcher. His scholarly focus lies in doctoral education, higher education cultures, and academic life across global contexts. His broader interests include comparative and international education, decolonisation, and English education.
Dr Michael J. Henderson
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Dr Michael J. Henderson is an academic educator and researcher. His scholarly interests are in the areas of adult learning and choice-making, higher education research approaches, leadership, and technologies (inside and outside of education). He is currently developing a laptop-based AI-enabled tool set for an upcoming project.
Dr Lynette Pretorius
Dr Lynette Pretorius is an award-winning educator and researcher specialising in doctoral education, AI literacy, research literacy, academic identity, and student wellbeing.
We often imagine doctoral writing as a solitary endeavour. The image of a PhD candidate working alone, a lone ‘genius’ wrestling with literature, writing drafts, chasing deadlines, and decoding reviewer comments, still dominates academic and public culture. When writing stalls or publications don’t succeed, we tend to blame the individual: a supposed lack of discipline, poor writing skills, or weak academic language. Struggle becomes a private burden, and many doctoral researchers internalise it as personal failure. Yet, writing has never been a purely individual practice. It is learned through participation: by talking about ideas, sharing unfinished drafts, observing how others revise, and engaging in dialogue about what counts as convincing academic work. Doctoral writing groups bring these often invisible processes into the open. They function as communities of practice where doctoral researchers collectively learn how to write, publish, and belong in academia.
Within writing groups, doctoral students do far more than polish dissertation paragraphs or sentences. They discuss ideas, test arguments, give and receive feedback, and gradually develop a sense of scholarly identity. These groups operate as critical sites of academic socialisation, where tacit disciplinary norms become discussable and where writing is understood not merely as output, but as a shared intellectual and relational practice. For many doctoral researchers, particularly those navigating unfamiliar academic cultures, writing groups offer one of the few structured spaces where scholarly participation can be safely explored and sustained.
What do doctoral writing groups actually do?
Academic socialisation is not a simple process of absorbing institutional rules. It involves learning how knowledge is constructed, how authority is performed, and how uncertainty is managed in scholarly work. Writing groups play a crucial role in this process by creating dialogic spaces where doctoral researchers can collectively interpret the expectations of academic writing and publishing. Through regular discussion and feedback, participants in writing groups learn how disciplinary arguments are structured, how voice is negotiated, and how critique operates as a generative rather than punitive force.
Importantly, writing groups normalise struggle. Seeing peers grapple with similar challenges disrupts the myth that successful academic writing is effortless or innate. Confidence, in this context, is not a fixed personal attribute but a relational accomplishment that emerges through shared reflective practice in a space that fosters mutual support and repeated engagement with feedback.
These social processes matter because writing is inseparable from identity. Learning to write academically is also learning how to position oneself as a legitimate contributor to a field. Writing groups, therefore, serve as spaces where doctoral students not only improve texts but also actively become scholars.
Our most recent paper synthesised findings from forty-one studies on doctoral writing groups and provides compelling evidence for the pedagogical significance of these spaces. Across diverse disciplines and institutional contexts, writing groups consistently emerged as central environments for learning how to write for publication and how to navigate the emotional and intellectual demands of academic work. The paper demonstrates that writing groups directly support publication readiness by making the hidden curriculum of academia visible. Within these groups, doctoral researchers learn how to select journals, interpret reviewer feedback, respond strategically to critique, and manage rejection as a normal part of scholarly life. As such, writing groups can be understood as informal pedagogical apprenticeships that transform opaque publishing processes into collective learning experiences.
A particularly significant finding concerns writing confidence. Rather than preceding successful writing, our findings show that confidence is produced through participation. It develops as doctoral researchers observe peers revise drafts, engage in feedback exchanges, and persist through setbacks. This challenges deficit-based models that locate writing difficulty within individuals and instead highlights the social and structural conditions that enable doctoral writers to flourish.
Why does this matter?
These findings have important implications for how doctoral writing and publishing are understood. Writing groups should not be viewed as optional supports, wellness initiatives, or productivity tools for struggling students. They are foundational pedagogical spaces where skill development, identity formation, and scholarly belonging intersect.
For doctoral researchers, writing groups counter the profound isolation that often characterises advanced research. They provide continuity, accountability, and a sense of shared purpose. For supervisors and educators, they offer complementary spaces where learning unfolds collectively rather than solely through hierarchical supervision relationships. For institutions, writing groups represent a powerful mechanism for enhancing equity by demystifying academic norms and supporting diverse pathways into scholarly participation.
What if writing groups were central to doctoral education?
Taken together, the evidence in our latest study calls for a shift in how doctoral education is imagined and organised. If publishing is a central expectation of doctoral training, then the pedagogical structures that support learning to write and publish must be embedded systematically within doctoral programs. Writing groups should be recognised as essential infrastructure rather than left to informal or ad hoc arrangements. For theory, this reframes doctoral writing as a socially situated practice of becoming rather than an individual technical skill. For practice, it highlights the need for intentional design, skilled facilitation, and institutional investment in writing groups that foster psychological safety, inclusivity, and reflexive engagement with academic norms.
Moving beyond the individual deficit model requires a corresponding shift in institutional imagination. Doctoral writing groups exemplify how learning is collective, dialogic, and relational. By formally recognising and supporting these spaces, universities can replace a pedagogy of isolation with a pedagogy of shared learning and belonging in academia.
Questions to ponder
What messages about “good” academic writing did you internalise during your doctoral training? Where did they come from and how did you learn these norms?
Do writing groups address or reproduce the norms of academic writing?
What are the implicit norms of academic publishing?
How can academic careers be influenced by inadequate support or inexperienced writing group facilitation?
How do institutional structures either support or undermine the sustainability of doctoral writing groups?
Research funding acknowledgement
Note: We acknowledge that this research was made possible through funding from the Monash-Warwick Alliance Education Fund and a Research Grant from the Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australia.
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