Dr. Stephanie Link: Graduate Writing Workshops and Dissemity
Associate Professor and Graduate College Faculty Fellow, Dr. Stephanie Link, utilized her unique upbringing and academic preparation as motivating factors in her career success. Being a first-generation Asian-Cuban American and first-generation college student, Dr. Link used her life-long struggles with academic language to create opportunities for future generations. She found a way of making a messy writing process manageable by introducing students to tools for finding their researcher identity through writing.
Completing her PhD in Applied Linguistics and Technology at Iowa State University in May 2015, Dr. Link rolled right into a faculty position here at OSU later that same year. Upon arrival, she noticed a gap between what was available to emerging scientific writers and what she had to offer based on her lived experiences and research interests. This sparked a great interest in creating unique opportunities that assist graduate students with writing for publication. By her second semester at OSU, Dr. Link had begun implementing these ideas in the form of workshops in collaboration with the Graduate College, Writing Center, and OSU Library.
The Dissertation Writing Workshop is a week-long workshop designed for students in their final year of a doctoral program. The workshop exposes students to many different tools and resources for navigating the writing process, including lectures from Dr. Link on formulating a research argument. Similarly, the Thesis Writing Workshop provides a range of writing resources and is offered as a one-day workshop for master’s students. These workshops quickly became a hit. Dr. Link says, “It was obvious how desirable the content was for students.”
Dr. Link saw the workshops as a strong tool for finishing a degree program but realized students needed help right from the start. She then created an eight-week course, listed as GRAD 5193, for students across disciplines. The course focuses on preparing a peer-reviewed journal manuscript. Her goal was to expose students to disciplinary writing conventions early in their programs to help stimulate progress towards one of their first publications. Knowing that she created an opportunity for guidance in the beginning and end of the research process, Dr. Link noticed there was something missing in the middle. This gap paved the way for her future research and thus the beginnings of her intelligent tutoring system—Dissemity.
Dissemity—for disseminating research with clarity—is a web-based technology for supporting early-career researchers with writing for publication. The program provides evidence-based instructional content and state-of-the-art resources to make research writing easier and faster. It is designed to break research writing into its core components so writers can quickly and confidently conceive their writing task as a functional, publishable whole. This resource also includes a searchable collection of thousands of articles from a variety of fields available for graduate students to explore the conventions specific to published work in their area. Dissemity is available to students across campus with their OKState credentials. With funding provided by a major NSF grant, Dr. Link and her soon-to-be postdoctoral researcher, Robert Redmon, will expand the functionality of this technology so that users can receive automated feedback on manuscripts and grant abstracts.
At this point, over 500 OSU students have used Dissemity (or its predecessor, Wrangler) to enhance their writing. Dr. Link intends to expand its use both on and off campus as she builds her network of academic partnerships from across the country. Dr. Link sees this as a great opportunity to invite collaborators from all disciplines with ideas to help expand OSU's research dissemination as a top-tier research university.