Meet the small but mighty team behind CSU Writes.
Find your answers to general questions about our program, as well as those specific to faculty / graduate student / postdoctoral researchers.
Read about the value CSU Writes programming can bring to your academic writing career.
About CSU Writes
CSU’s researchers and scholars shape the future by building ideas, driving innovation, launching careers, and strengthening communities through our writing. Rooted in our land-grant mission, we change lives through research that is published, funded, and cited. Together, as a vibrant research writing community, we position Colorado State University as a global leader in scholarly writing and research excellence.
We support researchers and scholars across the career span as they write for publication, degree completion, and leadership in their fields. Through evidence-based, flexible programming, we help CSU’s experts and emerging experts write more consistently, more confidently, and with greater ease and impact. We promote sustainable writing practices, build writing confidence, and develop the skills essential for career readiness, scholarly leadership, and success across disciplines.
CSU Writes is a writing facilitation program designed for professional researchers and academic writers who are interested in boosting their productivity as they develop a sustainable writing practice.
While select offerings are open to all writers on campus, CSU Writes’ primarily serves faculty, postdoctoral fellows, and graduate students who write for publication, submission, and/or degree completion.
As a research support program, CSU Writes is gratefully housed in the Office of the Vice President for Research and receives program funds from the Graduate School.
Dr. Kristina Quynn founded CSU Writes in 2015 with grant funds from the Ripple Effect. The program grew with support from the Graduate School, the Provost’s Office, and the Office of the Vice President for Research. It is a university base-funded program.
CSU Writes supports CSU’s researchers as professional writers who are experts or becoming-experts in their fields of study. To work at the cutting edge of a field now requires that the elite researchers in a discipline not only perform innovative research but also communicate that research to meet the expectations of a range of specialized genres, styles, and audiences. Cutting-edge writing, thus, requires innovative, nimble support. To that purpose, CSU Writes is continually adding to or modifying program offerings to best suit the needs of CSU’s researchers.
In 2017, CSU Writes began studies on sustainable writing practices among research writers and producing scholarship on career-sustaining writing support for researchers in academe. Dr. Quynn has presented at national conferences about write-on-site models and writing retreats and locally about faculty women writing support. She has collaborated on projects studying the writing habits of graduate student writers and the relational writing practices of faculty and graduate student who produce co-authored publications. Future projects look to clarify the writing methods of research teams.
CSU Writes is NOT the Writing Center
The CSU Writing Center is housed in the English Department. It provides writing consultations for undergraduate and graduate student writers to discuss their current writing project.
You can learn more about the Writing Center at: https://writingcenter.colostate.edu
About CSU Writes
TESTIMONIALS
From Faculty Participants:
“My writing group definitely kept me writing–i.e., making my writing time a priority. It also helped me think about quality vs. quantity issues, publication strategies, etc.”
“With the help of CSU Writes I was able to form a writing group that met every Wednesday. What I found most interesting is that my colleagues in my writing group also had similar difficulties finding time to write because of teaching commitments…”
“Thank you very much for organizing this workshop and arranging for the speaker (Dr. Jensen). It was very helpful to learn about the myths and for knowing what I am going through is not unique. Very helpful.”
“Have too numerous to count unfinished projects and have lost my way in how to chip off a little to make any perceived progress against this mountain. Now I have the tools to begin a new exciting phase of my life.”
“I am a tenure-track faculty member and must write to keep my job. This has been a struggle and I found this workshop to be very helpful in goal setting and strategies for accomplishing writing goals.”
“I would like to see CSU Writes continue and expand in the future. All new faculty as well as grad students should be alerted to it.”
From Grad Student Participants:
“… I benefited from all of the offerings I participated in and the writing practices I learned about. Being in a field known for bad writers and yet having to produce quality writing has been a challenge. I felt like I had little support from my department, committee, and advisor to help me learn how to be a good academic writer. CSU Writes was able to fill that gap for me. I think the sense of community resulting for discussions with others in the workshops, retreat, and writing groups were extremely helpful. The workshops and retreats really helped me to look at writing as a practice, which allowed me to give myself permission to try different approaches to see what worked best for me. I also cannot say enough about how helpful “show up & write” was for helping me to move forward with my writing. Having a neutral space away from the distractions at my office was really helpful in getting me to spend my writing time actually writing. It also really helped me to regularly schedule my writing because I could treat it as I would a class.”