A GRADUATE COURSE ON ACADEMIC PUBLISHING

Research and our experience as writing instructors tell us that effective writers evaluate their own writing by drawing on two main resources—content knowledge and discourse knowledge. Graduate students are generally quite confident in the former and often unaware of the subtle but powerful role of the latter, which includes a knowledge of audiences and metalinguistic knowledge about writing genres, especially specialized disciplinary ones. Because we recognize the increased pressure on graduate students to publish (and therefore, implicitly, to be aware of both content and discourse), we have designed and taught a graduate-level course in Academic Publishing. In our paper we will discuss the theoretical underpinnings for the course, the course contents, and the evaluation of the course by the first group of graduate students who enrolled in it in the fall of 2000. We will also discuss lessons learned and improvements we hope to make in subsequent iterations of the course.