Through one-on-one consultations, your writing coach—Julia Dauer, Jess Engebretson, or Michelle Niemann—engages with your drafts in a substantive yet generous way. We are sharp readers, and we don’t hesitate to ask you questions about your argument and to alert you to any possible critiques that we can anticipate. At the same time, we’re committed to creating a space where you can safely share messy, truly in-progress work while you’re in the thick of drafting and revising it.
Because you and your writing coach discuss your draft in detail, each hour-long writing consultation helps you develop a concrete plan for moving your project forward.
What makes us unique as writing coaches?
We provide kind, process-based support.
We understand academic writing as an iterative process that makes both intellectual and emotional demands on writers. Our coaching combines pragmatism and optimism in order to meet individual writers where they are.
Sometimes a coach’s role is to encourage a writer to re-engage with their own passion for a project, rethink its structure, or revise it substantially. At other times, our role is to encourage a writer to overcome perfectionism and let their manuscript move on to the next stage.
We respond to your work-in-progress in an intellectually rigorous way.
We’re willing to be frank with writers and ask difficult questions that come out of both our knowledge and our ignorance. We aim to push your thinking by explaining our readerly perspectives honestly: your coach will tell you which claims they find compelling, which points they don’t follow, and what they find provocative and want to hear more about.
Teaching in writing centers and composition classrooms has provided us with rhetorical awareness that we’ve sharpened by working one-on-one with hundreds of faculty members writing in a wide variety of fields. Because we’ve each earned a PhD in English and published our own scholarly work, we’re familiar with both the conventions of academic writing and broad theoretical trends and conversations in the humanities.
However, our ignorance is often more useful to our coaching clients than our knowledge. Your coach isn’t in your field or subfield; they don’t know much about your particular topic of study. In other words, your coach has an outsider’s perspective and no ego to protect, so they’re willing to ask naive questions. Frank questions help you reflect on the premises of your field, what knowledge you can assume on the part of your intended audience, how you can best frame the issues at hand, and what points you need to state explicitly.
We think with you about how, concretely, to revise your drafts.
Your coach will read an article or chapter draft in advance of each consultation and get into the weeds with you about revision options. Engaging on the substance of the draft is essential because these conversations help you make the crucial big and small rhetorical decisions that go into drafting and revising an academic monograph, journal article, or chapter for an edited collection.
Such detailed conversations help you think through the kinds of writing conundrums that are impossible to solve in abstract terms: the order of sections, the order of paragraphs, the movement of the argument, the kinds of evidence and rhetorical appeals that your intended readers will find most compelling, and so on. Focusing on drafts also gives us an evidence-based way to reflect on your writing process and develop strategies for changing any habits that may be holding you back.
So what happens in consultations?
The basic process of “talking through to write through” can take many different forms depending on what works best for the writer. While pretty much all the writers we work with spend at least some time explaining their arguments to us during consultations, beyond that there’s a lot of variety. For example, some writers record conversations with their coach so they can then mine the transcript for their own clear articulations of their argument and incorporate these into the draft. Most writers make revision plans, while some draft or revise during the session.
The academic writers we work with use their writing consultations to:
- develop and refine their arguments;
- more clearly articulate their interventions in their field or fields;
- rethink structure at all levels (chapters, sections, paragraphs, sentences);
- assess their current projects and prioritize;
- set goals and hold themselves accountable for deadlines;
- reflect on their writing process and figure out how to take advantage of their own rhythms and modes;
- get an outside perspective that helps take their anxiety down a notch;
- and decide how to revise in response to feedback.
How is ongoing coaching structured?
We each meet with clients on a regular, ongoing basis, holding an hour-long, one-on-one consultation every two weeks or every four weeks. We are open to stand-alone or occasional consultations, but they’re most useful for writers who want to have just one or two consultations about a short project. In our experience, meeting every two weeks or every four weeks is best for scholars in the humanities who are drafting or revising a monograph.
In fact, our key recommendation for the structure of coaching is that consultations take place regularly, based on time rather than milestone. That is, it’s much more effective to meet every four weeks, no matter how far you’ve gotten on chapter 3, for example, than it is to meet once you’ve finished chapter 3.
Not only does waiting to meet until a given piece of writing is finished make the consultation endlessly deferrable (you don’t meet with your coach because you aren’t finished with chapter 3 yet), but it also deprives you of coaching when you need it most. When you’re in the middle of drafting and revising, that’s when it’s useful for you to talk through your argument, figure out what you’re really trying to say, and decide what to expand and what to cut or skip. Coaching can help you leap forward on a project when you’re willing to share a really messy draft and think with someone else about it.
A Note for Graduate Students
If you’re pursuing your PhD or master’s degree, you most likely have access to writing support for free. Most universities have writing centers, which are sometimes called writing labs. Many of them offer graduate students one-on-one appointments with a peer writing consultant, often another graduate student trained in working with writers. We also encourage graduate students (and all academic writers!) to set up a regular writing group with peers inside or outside of your department or institution.
Rates and Policies
The best way to explore the possibility of working together through ongoing coaching consultations is to schedule a brief, free conversation with one of us. You and your coach will talk about your project, any external pressures you’re facing (such as a tenure clock), and your concerns about the writing process—and you’ll figure out if you’re a good fit.
Our rate is $245 for each writing consultation. This rate includes the one-hour consultation as well as your coach’s reading of your draft in advance.
We are committed to ethical coaching; we are not ghostwriters. We keep your work in progress and our work together confidential, and we only add projects to our portfolio with the writer’s express permission.
As writing coaches, we will engage with your ideas with curiosity, rigor, and kindness. Your coach won’t hesitate to let you know about any concerns they have about your argument, but we always aim to do so in a way that empowers and enables you. Think of it as very low-stakes peer review from a generous generalist.