Graduate Transitions: Canadian Master’s and PhD Writing Experiences

This exploratory study researches the experiences of Canadian graduate students as they pursue writing tasks for their degree. A better understanding of the difficulties Canadian graduate students experience in completing key components of their programs, as well as of the supports both existing and needed, could enable supervisors, administrators, and graduate students themselves to more expediently overcome barriers to timely degree completion. The research uses a case study design based on qualitative focus group interviews to provide detailed information regarding both interdisciplinary and single discipline Master’s and PhD students’ perceived experiences with their academic writing tasks and available supports. The approach is informed by academic literacy theory. Graduate students who participated in this study identified transitions related to the pressure to publish and professionalize, and to the misalignments between their own and supervisory and institutional expectations, which resulted in some interrogation of institutional norms. They utilized Writing Centre, online and supervisory supports, but called for additional ongoing and peer support. The study has implications for the development of new, collaborative, and peer-based writing supports, as well as identifying future research areas related to interdisciplinary degrees and continuing stages of transition.

267 several levels. Given the shift in expectations from undergraduate to graduate academic writing tasks, Casanave (2019) suggests that demonstrating expertise in research methods and genres is an ongoing performance, both for students and supervisors, long before it becomes a reality. Indeed, if we accept that writing is a social practice, not a set of skills or a deficit in need of fixing, as Badenhorst et al., (2015) stipulate, then it follows that some of the hardest tasks for graduate writers are those that mark belonging within knowledge-making communities. The use of graduate genres, development of a professional voice, and, perhaps the ultimate mark of acceptance, peer-reviewed publication, all fall within this territory and, not coincidentally, are key obstacles identified in the research on graduate writing. Several studies note that these professional markers are also intersected by personal capabilities such as the ability to handle stress and resilience in the face of uncertainty (Badenhorst & Xu, 2016;Holmes et al., 2018;Huerta et al., 2017). Lindsay (2015) posits that situational, writing, and emotional factors all play a role in promoting or hindering thesis completion, and Odena and Burgess (2017) identify personal organization and the need for "individually tailored supportive feedback" as key components in their qualitative research on facilitating strategies for thesis writing (p. 572). As Badenhorst and Xu (2016) conclude, academic writers need both critical competence and emotional intelligence to succeed as published researchers.
Interdisciplinary graduate writing, as the majority of our participants were doing, adds a further set of challenges for students negotiating the acquisition of a professional academic identity. While European and North American universities are increasingly championing interdisciplinarity (Hibbert et al., 2014;Kaufhold, 2017), novice writers in interdisciplinary studies may be expected to master multiple voices and disciplinary positions. As defined by Julie Thompson Klein, "Interdisciplinarity is a means of solving problems and answering questions that cannot be satisfactorily addressed using single methods or approaches" (as cited in Borrego & Newswander, 2010, p. 63). It is integrative, bringing together knowledge and methods from two or more disciplines in combination and synthesis (Bishop-Williams et al., 2017;Hibbert et al., 2014). In doing so, interdisciplinary work challenges traditional university and professional organizational structures, which are based on disciplinary distinctions, and much of the literature focuses on such challenges related to interdisciplinary funding, administration, publishing, and hiring (ASHE Higher Education Report, 2009;Boden & Borrego, 2011;Borrego & DePauw, 2012;Clark et al., 2011;Hall, 2014). Research that looks specifically at the supervisory relationship and writing tasks in interdisciplinary studies identifies the lack of a community, common terminology, audience, or methods as creating added Canadian Journal for Studies in Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie Volume 30, 2020 http://journals.sfu.ca/cjsdw 268 complexity (Borrego & Newswander, 2010;Hibbert et al., 2014;Holley, 2015). Kathrin Kaufhold (2017) notes that the acquisition of a professional voice is a particularly complicated and dynamic positioning process for interdisciplinary graduate writers. Furthermore, Kaufhold explains, "Academic Literacies research has emphasized the heterogeneous nature of disciplines and demonstrated the limits of disciplines as frames for student enculturation into academia," with students in her interdisciplinary study "question[ing] the relevance of a disciplinary community" (p. 254). Indeed, Kam and Meinema's (2005) earlier research identified the mismatch between disciplinary and interdisciplinary expectations as a factor in supervisor and international graduate student tensions. Given these complexities, Vanstone et al.'s (2013) call for "more empirical and theoretical exploration of barriers to and facilitators of [interdisciplinary] research" seems warranted (p. 60).
Alongside interdisciplinary concerns in graduate writing, education scholars have come to recognize that learning contexts vary and this can significantly impact the effectiveness of pedagogical interventions (Lindblom-Ylänne et al., 2006). Specifically, graduate programs can vary internationally in important respects such as admissions requirements, amount of coursework, criteria for completion, and length of funding. For this reason, it is important to consider the Canadian graduate writing context as distinct. Indeed, in a general sense, Canadian writing instruction varies significantly from U.S. models due, as Kevin Brooks (2002), Nan Johnson (2006), Judith Kearns and Brian Turner (2008) explain, to national and institutional histories which tended to favour literary approaches and often did not make discursive expectations explicit. Existing Canadian-based research on graduate writing has not directly addressed this history; however, Canadian studies such as those by Starke-Meyerring (2011), Badenhorst and Xu (2016), Stooke and Hibbert (2017), and Badenhorst (2018a) emphasize the need for greater transparency regarding graduate writing expectations, suggesting the impacts of this pedagogical legacy. Doreen Starke-Meyerring (2011) specifically points to the tacit assumptions behind Canadian graduate writing, noting how these impact doctoral writers' progress and suggesting the need for a graduate curriculum that examines "the roles of writing and discourse in the production of knowledge, researcher identity, disciplinarity" (p. 93). Moreover, there have been recent calls for change to graduate degrees in Canada which would place greater emphasis on interdisciplinarity, alternate forms of dissemination, and non-traditional career paths (Amell & Badenhorst, 2018;McAlpine & Amundsen, 2011;White Paper, 2013

Methods
This study was conducted to further research on the writing experiences of graduate students and to inform current and future graduate writing support services and programming. The research questions were: RQ1: What are graduate students' past and present perceived experiences of graduate-level communication, particularly the literature review? RQ2: What supports or pedagogical approaches currently prepare students for graduate writing tasks? How can that support system be improved?
To achieve this dual purpose, the researchers conducted qualitative focus group interviews to obtain a rich description of graduate students' perceived experiences with their academic writing tasks and of the supports available to them. A case study design was chosen to investigate and describe how our institution's graduate students perceived the transition to graduate-level communication, and to determine how graduate student writing may be better supported through campus programs and services. While the results may not necessarily be generalizable to other institutions, the study contributes to the growing research into graduate writing experiences in Canadian postsecondary institutions and seeks to further recommendations for institutional support for the transition to graduate-level writing.
This study was conducted through the university's graduate writing centre and received approval from the University's Behavioural Research Ethics Board. The centre, established in 2011, provides consultations (~700/year) and workshops (~40/year) to support graduate student writing.
Graduate students were recruited during January and February 2014 for an initial online FluidSurvey through campus email, posters, and social media. The intent of the survey was to gather initial data about the graduate students at our institution, the areas they identified for improvement with their writing tasks, and the supports they accessed, and follow up focus groups would gather more information-rich data about their experiences with transitioning to graduate-level writing. Limited survey results that identified writing the literature review as a problem area have been reported elsewhere (Walter & Stouck, 2020). The researchers invited all survey respondents in the first year Canadian Journal for Studies in Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie Volume 30, 2020 http://journals.sfu.ca/cjsdw 270 of a Master's or Doctoral degree to participate in a series of focus groups that would gather data throughout the duration of the students' graduate programs. Six in-person focus groups were completed between April 2014 and November 2015. Two initial focus groups (April 16 and 28, 2014) were asked questions about writing tasks and accessing supports (see Appendix A), and the subsequent focus groups in November 2014, December 2014, April 2015, and November 2015 were asked versions of the same questions that recognized they were further along in their degrees (see Appendix B). Seven graduate students participated in the initial two focus groups. Six of these students participated in the subsequent focus groups (Table 1). There were no participants in the final focus group scheduled for August 2016 because most participants had either completed their degree or their PhD residency requirement and had moved from the region. However, after examining the data gathered from the previous focus groups, the researchers felt that data saturation had been reached because similar question responses were appearing across the focus groups. The focus groups were digitally recorded and then transcribed by a graduate student using InqScribe. The transcripts were analyzed by two research team members using an inductive analysis approach and constant comparative method. NVivo software was used to assist with the data analysis. The data analysis began with the two principal researchers creating potential coding nodes based on the research questions, interview guides, initial survey data, and reading of the literature.
For example, initial nodes included transition to graduate-level communication, past writing and research experiences, present writing and research experiences, writing anxiety, writing the literature review, pressure to publish, helpful existing writing supports, student requested writing supports, supervisor support, peer support, timely graduate degree completion, among others. These Canadian Journal for Studies in Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie Volume 30, 2020 http://journals.sfu.ca/cjsdw 271 nodes created in advance were intended to allow for analysis related to the research questions. New nodes were also created during the first round of coding to identify emerging relevant text related to both the researchers' concerns and the participants' subjective experiences. For example, emerging nodes included confusion over genre or terminology, variations in expectations, difficulties managing large amounts of information, among others. After the first round of coding, the researchers refined the nodes list for the second round of thematic coding. Some nodes were split into multiple nodes to capture several themes emerging in a particular node; for example, writing the literature review became three separate nodes and the peer support node was split into existing peer supports and requested peer supports to match the distinctions participants were highlighting in their discussions.
Other nodes were broadened to better capture several associated repeating ideas; for example, Committee Support was changed to Faculty Support to capture that participants were receiving similar help from both committee and non-committee member faculty mentors and the two nodes capturing past and present writing and research experiences became one node called past and present writing and research experiences facilitating the transition to graduate-level communication because participants were not talking about these experiences as distinct. The second round of coding was completed by the two initial coders and an additional graduate research assistant coder.
This third coder was introduced to strengthen the reliability and credibility of the data analysis, and this particular graduate student was selected because she had completed the initial transcription of the audio and thus was familiar with the research data. After the second round of coding, the three coders met to discuss the coding. Themes were then finalized by the two principal investigators, which are discussed below.
To increase the trustworthiness of the results, the participants in the focus groups were chosen from various degree programs within Applied Sciences, Social Sciences, and Humanities and language backgrounds, and they were studied over the course of their programs and until data saturation was achieved. In addition, member checking with two participants was completed, and two external peers reviewed and provided feedback on the final research report. Because the data collection and analysis was completed by two researchers who also work or had worked in the graduate student writing centre, they discussed and reflected on their potential biases and assumptions, as well as the possible insights to be gained from their positionality. Using NVivo allowed for immersion in the data but also a distance that aided in this reflection process. As mentioned, the study results may not be generalizable to other contexts, but this exploratory study hopes to indicate areas for further research and add to the literature on Canadian graduate student For these students, the process of transition becomes even more complicated, as they are negotiating multiple sets of expectations in which the norms of one discipline may not align with those of another discipline. Throughout our focus groups, comments related to graduate transitions were often implicit rather than explicit, due in part to the phrasing of the focus group questions. However, the shift from undergraduate or professional to graduate expectations underlies most of the experiences

Pressure to Publish and Professionalize
An unsurprising marker of the transition into graduate work elucidated by our study was the pressure all participants felt to publish, which was linked to the development of a professional research identity. It was noteworthy that all participants mentioned this theme and it was addressed across all the focus groups. As Participant C explained, "I've been told pretty much the goal all the way through my PhD is to publish everything I write." Several participants described faculty and supervisor support for publication, with one participant actually publishing in collaboration with a faculty member. Participant B noted the value of a more experienced faculty member providing guidance through the steps of picking a journal, then drafting and formatting with that journal's subject focus in mind. Most participants described being encouraged to view their coursework, thesis, and even comprehensive exam papers as revisable for publication. As Participant C explained, "typically they really encourage their graduate students not to write assignments, but to write manuscripts, so everything is targeted towards a journal." Book reviews and conference paper proceedings were also identified as initial opportunities for publication that could help these new researchers establish themselves within their respective knowledge-making communities. As Participant F explained about a recently completed book review, It's going in a journal […] like a special issue that was a bunch of people in the same field who were all on a panel together and then they -each of them were professors -invited a few of their students to do book reviews so it will be really handy to have my name in an issue with a bunch of other people in my field.
Despite these recognitions of the need to publish and faculty support for publication, participants expressed difficulty or frustration over achieving that first publication. Respondents described the "struggle" of revising, and Participant G commented particularly on the difficulty of converting material from a Master's project or course work into a publishable journal article. Clearly it was a new expectation that participants were grappling with, since most programs do not expect undergraduate students to publish in peer-reviewed forums.
Pressure to publish was frequently linked to the need to professionalize. As Participant C noted, publication not only creates recognition within one's field, but is often tied to further opportunities: been invited to participate in these tasks and why the push has been to publish manuscripts.
Participant G similarly identified publication as a "performance indicator" demonstrating one's professional qualifications and, in turn, preparation for the academic job market. This emphasis on publication is perhaps unsurprising, since Canadian graduate programs are scrutinized for their ability to produce successful researchers, the key marker of which is peer-reviewed publication (Badenhorst & Xu, 2016;Pickering et al., 2015). Moreover, future professional rewards in the forms of funding, jobs, and research opportunities are linked to publication, so that graduate students such as the focus group participants have received the message to publish loud and clear.

Expectations and Misalignments
Another, less widely-documented theme explicated by our focus group participants concerned the expectations held by graduate students, as well as the misalignments that could occur between faculty, institutional, and graduate student understandings. The focus group participants noted that their own initial expectations about the graduate research and writing process were not always accurate or realistic. Participant C, in our final interview, explained that, It's just, honestly it's been this last paper, which is the last paper of my coursework for my PhD, where all of a sudden a light has gone off and I've gone 'Oh I've been writing all wrong throughout this whole program.' Participant C noted that research methods had changed significantly since their undergraduate degree, which had been completed several years previously. Participant D, also a returning student, similarly found their research process had to shift, I think something that I would add because I've been out of the research realm for about ten years…. I look at the seminal writers and then I look at the most recent articles in that area and I kind of work toward the middle because I need to track the topic… through some time that I wasn't really participating.
In addition to expectations for their own learning, the participants entered their programs with clear expectations about supervision, including that they would receive guidance (without "spoonfeeding"), that they would be contacted and given feedback in a timely fashion, and that they In other cases, student expectations were not fully met, with one participant noting, "professor feedback would be wonderful in some areas but it's not always available." Such variations in supervisory support have been noted in previous literature (Carter & Kumar, 2017;Paré, 2011).
Following from the initial expectations students held as they began their graduate degrees, a dominant source of anxiety in the focus group discussions concerned the misalignments that could occur between student and faculty expectations. These misalignments covered both broader issues, such as academic roles (noted above), genre expectations, and institutional requirements, as well as narrower concerns around grammar and style conventions. Even narrower concerns, however, could be understood as related to academic enculturation. Participants reported confusion, for instance, over grammar and style conventions, which impacted their thesis and dissertation writing.
Participant E recalled, I had a professor that hated 'however' with the semicolon, comma, so every one of them was marked wrong. It was marked, period, capital H. Okay. But they're both correct, it's just how they want it. So sometimes… maybe not necessarily grammar errors, but grammar preferences.
The same participant astutely noted that some of this misalignment was likely due to the interdisciplinary aspect of their degree, since differences in terminology and style occurred across courses in several social science areas: you're publishing in an American journal" and the discussion ended with a participant saying, "Okay, so fight back." Indeed, the group proposed that the international as well as disciplinary backgrounds of faculty members can impact their expectations in regards to style and grammar. Often, it seemed, those expectations were communicated as absolutes rather than what they were -matters of preference or convention -and this led participants to question the validity of these instructions.
Without a single style guide used consistently throughout their programs, graduate students often find themselves unclear on which national or disciplinary norms to follow. Given that style guides communicate the values and standards of their professional organizations-the MLA Handbook (2016, p. vii) describes itself as embodying "the values that define the association"-these seemingly minor spelling and grammar issues can take on weight as markers of belonging or unbelonging.
Different understandings of genre similarly caused miscommunications between graduate students and faculty. One discussion centred around misunderstandings regarding the literature review and the amount of personal opinion that should be included in the discussion of existing research. Another discussion concerned how to manage the literature review in an interdisciplinary context, where students were expected to demonstrate knowledge and insider understandings of significance in two or more disciplines, rather than one. As a participant explains, In a similar sense, another focus group participant observed that the terminology used to assign work could carry varying expectations. The respondent recounted how, after completing several précis and an annotated bibliography, the professor's expectations for those genres turned out to be very different from conventional understandings. Suggesting, as above, a degree of frustration, the participant concluded, "some profs get it and they're really good at clarifying with their graduate students and some are not so succinct about what it is they're looking for." As with misalignments in grammar and style, confusion over genres often occurs due to disciplinary differences. For students genre definition to apply when, becomes highly complex, particularly since they are still learning the norms of each discipline (Vanstone et al., 2013). Although the challenges of writing interdisciplinary theses and dissertations are only beginning to be investigated in the scholarship (e.g. Kaufhold, 2017), they were a recurring topic for our participants who particularly emphasized the ways in which interdisciplinarity challenged the received conventions of graduate education. Indeed, Anthony Paré (2011) explains that supervisors frequently struggle to articulate what to them are norms of professional communication, making the transmission of expectations complicated even within a single discipline. This lack of transparency in communicating style and genre conventions appears to have lead our participants to question certain kinds of received information, exposing the tension authors such as Lea and Street (1998; have revealed between graduate students' need to adapt to academic discourse and expose its biases and exclusions. Expectations could also misalign in relation to institutional requirements. During the focus group discussions, participants discovered variations between programs for comprehensive exams and other formal requirements. During one session, Participants B and D found that their candidacy exams were taking quite different formats, with Participant B unable to contact committee members during the writing process and Participant D describing a more "collaborative" and consultative process. As they neared completion of their degrees, Participants C and E found that defense and final thesis formatting expectations could vary. Both expressed anxiety about this, with Participant C explaining, "there's no point in writing a huge long dissertation if they're going to turn around and say, well that actually doesn't conform to [University] expectations. And therefore you need to go back and rewrite huge portions of it." Such anxieties may be exacerbated by shifts occurring in graduate education in Canada. In the face of increasingly precarious academic employment, there have been several calls to "leverage" the skills acquired through graduate research into nontraditional, non-academic careers (see Graff, 2006;McAlpine & Amundsen, 2011;White Paper, 2013). This has been particularly pronounced in some institutional contexts (see Hibbert et al., 2014; McAlpine & Amundsen, 2011) and has resulted in calls for more interdisciplinary research as well as greater focus on alternate kinds of research dissemination (e.g. the thesis as a series of publications or presentation in digital forums) (White Paper, 2013). While noting that "disciplines are not stable entities" (p. 11), McAlpine and Amundsen (2011) call for the "rethinking of certain doctoral policies and practices" which may challenge "taken-for-granted assumptions underlying institutional Canadian Journal for Studies in Discourse and Writing/Rédactologie Volume 30, 2020 http://journals.sfu.ca/cjsdw 278 policies" (p. 170). As Canadian graduate education itself thus undergoes transition, it seems likely that students such as our participants will continue to experience multiple, ongoing levels of change.

Supporting the Transition
In addition to questions related to the transition to graduate-level communication, the focus group participants were explicitly asked to talk about the types of support they had been accessing throughout their degree programs. All of the focus group participants accessed writing support at the graduate writing centre throughout their degree, which included one-on-one writing support as well as a range of workshops. Several participants sought independent self-support, such as online blogs/guides and print/ebooks. Most participants were seeking multiple supports to further their transition to graduate-level writing and genres. Not at all surprising, the most talked about support was from direct supervisors. The most helpful supervisor supports mentioned across focus groups were guidance for finding key research and detailed feedback on writing. Although their experiences were mostly positive, some participants perceived areas where supervision could be improved.
Specifically While focus group participants were clearly finding existing supports helpful, a major concern for this research was to identify additional support needs. A recurring theme mentioned by all participants was more support from their peers, particularly writing support. Participant A reported that having a cohort of other students was helpful in ensuring writing expectations were met. Participants also seemed to desire further peer support beyond strictly feedback on writing to support their transition. Participant B wanted greater peer interaction because "writing [is] a very isolating process," while Participants B, D, and F explicitly discussed the lack of a "cohort" as a drawback of their program. These three participants also expressed a desire for the formation of peer writing groups.

Conclusions, Implications, and Further Research
Institutional collaboration is key for developing and providing the ongoing, collaborative, and peerbased initiatives needed to support graduate students and ensure their retention during their first year and later dissertation writing stages, which have been identified as common attrition periods (Council of Graduate Schools, 2010;DeClou, 2016). The graduate writing centre responded to the themes that emerged from this study and the findings reviewed in the literature by introducing new services and pursuing greater institutional collaboration to support graduate students throughout their degree programs. In partnership with Graduate Studies, a peer writing group program was cocreated to provide greater peer support, which was the most requested support at the time of the focus groups. This was intended to offer the ongoing discursive community identified in the literature and by the participants as necessary for supporting their various transitions. Peer groups enable graduate students to discuss and participate in the social practices that facilitate their enculturation into graduate school, knowledge-making communities, and the profession. Specifically, such groups provide a place to discuss the strategies involved when writing in multiple disciplines or for new genres; handling supervisor-student misalignments; and pursuing publication. The pressure to publish is an overwhelming expectation of the profession, the institution, supervisors, and the students themselves and must be addressed through multiple avenues in any graduate support program. To complement how the peer writing group program was addressing the pressure to publish, the scholarly communication librarian created a new series of workshops aimed at demystifying the publishing process and providing concrete support for writing for publication. The graduate writing centre began collaborating with a campus undergraduate research award program to support advanced undergraduate research and writing as these students often transition into graduate programs at the institution or elsewhere. Support at this stage also helps with managing student expectations and potential misalignments that can occur during their transition to graduatelevel communication, such as the ones identified by our participants. To aid students in their ongoing acquisition of new academic literacies for graduate school, dissertation writing, publication, and sessions. This new approach of ongoing, collaborative, and peer-based graduate student support arose from both our findings and from the call to move beyond a "dominant skills-based discourse" (Badenhorst et al., 2015) and deficit approach toward understanding writing as a social and discursive practice within knowledge-making communities (Badenhorst et al., 2015;Casanave & Li, 2008;Haggis, 2006). This academic literacy approach compels us to work together at local and institutional levels to examine and revolutionize our current supports to ensure they facilitate "sustained, disciplinary embedded writing pedagogies that allow graduate students to negotiate academic literacies over time" (Badenhorst et al., 2015).
In addition to these new directions for graduate writing support undertaken in response to the results, the research revealed avenues for continuing study. Specifically, the participants' experiences suggest a need to more fully identify and review Canadian interdisciplinary degree expectations. As noted above, interdisciplinary writers are often expected to navigate multiple genre and style expectations within their graduate projects. Such competing expectations significantly complicate the process of establishing a professional research identity (which identity, which discipline, which expectations should be met). Two of the focus group participants located their projects as interdisciplinary and specifically suggested that this led to the misalignments between their understandings and those of faculty members and supervisors. At the same time, interdisciplinary degrees are becoming more common and Canadian institutions in particular have embraced this trend (Hibbert et al., 2014;Vanstone et al., 2013). As Vanstone et al. (2013) note, In response to encouragement from funding agencies, enthusiasm from faculty and students, and an acknowledgement that the search for creative and innovative solutions to complex problems is best addressed through interdisciplinary collaborations, research-intensive universities are increasingly encouraging interdisciplinary projects and programs. (p. 43) Identifying appropriate responses to the challenges of interdisciplinary graduate work is thus a pressing concern, both in terms of facilitating graduate writing that crosses disciplinary boundaries  Hibbert et al. (2014) describe as a more collaborative interdisciplinary culture.
In doing so, as the participants in this study initiate, the norms and expectations of academic discourses can be productively questioned and transformed.
Similarly, the study participants revealed that transitions are ongoing within graduate research writing. Not only did they engage with "early stage" transitions in voice and academic roles, but participants revealed ongoing experiences of transition as they grappled with genre and style conventions, and, later in their degrees, negotiated institutional norms and prepared for professional publication. While graduate writing instruction directed at initial tasks of conceptualizing a research audience and developing a professional identity is undoubtedly valuable, our participants were clear about the need for ongoing peer and institutional supports as they grappled with "later stage" writing tasks and challenges. As one participant noted regarding a professional grant application during the final focus group, This year, writing [funding agency] grants I noticed there's a big gap on this campus… nobody knew what was supposed to go in that document, nobody could help me, really, they could read it and edited it for language, but there was no one that said well this is what they're really looking for in this particular area.
Similarly, professional publication typically requires profiling a new audience and revising to address reviewers' feedback, later stage degree tasks that graduate writers can find daunting. Understanding graduate writing as ongoing transition and finding ways to support it in that context is thus a valuable insight from our participants' commentary. Moreover, as Canadian graduate education itself shifts to new modes and norms, as well as interdisciplinary options, writing needs seem bound to continue changing in ways that warrant ongoing investigation.
This study has sought to contribute to the emerging research into Canadian graduate writing by describing the perceptions of Master's and PhD students as they progressed through their graduate writing tasks. In addition to proposing strategies for graduate writing support, this research points to continuing areas for study as novice scholars, and indeed graduate programs themselves, transition into more complex futures.