Essential Actions for Academic Writers is a writing textbook for all novice academic students, undergraduate or graduate, to help them understand how to write effectively throughout their academic and professional careers. While these novice writers may use English as a second or additional language, this book is also intended for students who have done little writing in their prior education or who are not yet confident in their academic writing. Essential Actions combines genre research, proven pedagogical practices, and short readings to help students develop their rhetorical flexibility by exploring and practicing the key actions that will appear in academic assignments, such as explaining, summarizing, synthesizing, and arguing.  Part I introduces students to rhetorical situation, genre, register, source use, and a framework for understanding how to approach any new writing task. The genre approach recognizes that all writing responds to a context that includes the writer’s identity, the reader’s expectations, the purpose of the text, and the conventions that shape it. Part II explores each essential action and provides examples of the genres and language that support it. Part III leads students in combining the actions in different genres and contexts, culminating in the project of writing a personal statement for a university or scholarship application. 

The goal of this collected volume is to explore roles that L2 writing specialists, IEP directors and instructors, writing center administrators, and others within writing studies might play in potential cross-campus dialogues on graduate student writing support. This book is designed both for writing studies researchers interested in new directions for graduate writing research and for practitioners or program directors looking for practical directions for their own programs. It includes a diverse chorus of voices on graduate writing support--both seasoned, well-known researchers in second language writing and composition studies and fresh new voices and perspectives. Part 1, Graduate Writing: What Do We Know? What Do We Need to Know? looks at graduate writing support internationally, laying out what these courses and programs look like currently, what gaps exist in current program design, and what future work is needed. Part 2, Issues in Graduate Program and Curricular Design, explores the nuts and bolts of graduate writing support at both the classroom and program level. While this section does feature specific programs offered from a variety of academic units-IEPs, English or communication departments, writing centers, etc.-the goal is to focus more on principles of design and concerns (academic, administrative, budgetary, etc.) to consider in one's own institutional setting. Part 3, Program Profiles, is a response to the request from many within the graduate writing community for more published examples of successful program models. The volume includes five programs from around the world that highlight particular ways programs were developed to meet specific institutional needs-the University of Delaware, the University of Toronto, the University of New South Wales, Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, and Yale University. The volume ends with reflections on some of the emerging themes and strategies and tips for programmatic responses to graduate student needs.