A Writers’ Circle: Spiraling into Print

Abstract

Writing for publication is both a skill and an art that requires time, energy, discipline, a potential audience, and something to write about. For many post-graduate students it is a new stage in their professional development. To provide structure for this development and to manifest the prerequisite qualities, a group of post-graduate students in the Discipline of Social Work and Social Policy at the University of Western Australia created The Writers' Circle. In this article we report on unexpected discoveries that contributed to our success. We review the structure and commitments of the group that led to us fulfilling our aim of each member submitting an article for publication to a peer-reviewed journal. In this article we provide suggestions on how others might establish an effective and emotionally safe writers' circle. Drawing Out the Purpose of the CircleThe Writers' Circle was initiated following informal discussions among a group of post-graduate students concerning the challenges of progressing from writing for their thesis to writing for publication. These challenges included acquiring knowledge of how to get started, adapting writing styles to meet the requirements of particular journals, staying on task, and having access

Building Scholarly Writers: Student Perspectives on Peer Review in a Doctoral Writing Seminar

“…Further, other social work authors have reported that informal peer support through writing groups outside of the classroom is a helpful tool for promoting the scholarly productivity of both social work doctoral students (Page-Adams, Cheng, Gogineni, & Shen, 1995;Stratton, Upton-Davis, & Johnson, 2009) and faculty members (Bibus, Link, Rooney, Strom-Gottfried, & Sullivan, 1999). In a systematic review of factors facilitating dissertation completion specifically among social work doctoral students, Liechty, Liao, and Schull (2009) found that social support from both mentors and peers was critical to students' success.…”