From Productivity to Process: Flipping the Writing Group

Although research productivity is the most important component in academic promotions, faculty are left on their own to excel, often without resources, sufficient support, or information. This isolated aspect of workloads can become oppressive and work against the outcome: scholarly productivity. This paper outlines the literature on writing groups, focusing on benefits in and outside of academia, and presents a case example of the authors’ own writing group. It discusses a paradigm shift in the writing process as the group worked together: they moved from accountability to establishing healthy habits, from surveillance and punishment to self-care, and from external validation to intrinsic motivation by finding identities as writers.