Graduate students often have a uniquely challenging relationship with writing. Given those challenges, a new way of thinking about graduate writing can be powerful. In order to shift their perspective on academic writing, graduate students need consistent and concrete support with their writing. In this talk, Rachael Cayley will discuss how to help graduate students to build a new mindset before presenting some key writing principles and strategies.
Rachael is the Director of the Centre for Graduate Professional Development at the School of Graduate Studies at the University of Toronto. She is also an Associate Professor, Teaching Stream in the Graduate Centre for Academic Communication. Before joining the University of Toronto, she worked as an editor at Oxford University Press in Toronto. She has a PhD in philosophy from the New School for Social Research and a BA in political science from the University of British Columbia. Rachael has a blog, Explorations of Style, which discusses a wide range of topics associated with graduate writing. Her book, Thriving as a Graduate Writer (University of Michigan Press, 2023), offers principles, strategies, and habits for effective academic writing. Her new project, Writing Together (University of Michigan Press, 2025), is an co-edited collection about the way writing groups use sociality to support graduate writers.
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Thank you for taking the time to join our LSAC community today. Before we begin, we would like to pause to intentionally express our gratitude for the land we are on today and to all the Indigenous Peoples past, present and future that have and continue to be stewards of these lands. We recognize that moving forward we are mutually responsible for the caretaking and preservation of this land for future generations.
We commit to co-creating an accountable space. In our LSAC community, we are committed to creating an accountable space where we welcome individual growth, learning, and unlearning. In this space, we recognize and gently remind one another that we are all tender humans with our own stories and experiences, both positive and negative. We aim to lead with kindness, openness, and patience as we identify and break down barriers to create a safer space for us all.