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Scientists in applied fields, including conservation biology, face increasing expectations to communicate their research across multiple audiences. As environmental issues become more complex, the need for scientists to clearly communicate with other scientists, managers, stakeholders, tribes, the public, and policy makers becomes ever critical. Despite this need, students in graduate science programs receive limited direct instruction in writing and little training in writing for audiences outside of academia or in different genres. To that end, we developed an interdisciplinary program that incorporates rhetorical theory and writing intensive pedagogy to train graduate science students to write more effectively across genres. During the pilot testing in the first year of this broader, multiyear program, we evaluated changes in the writing practices and confidence of participants as writers and scientists who completed a low‐investment, two‐workshop sequence that highlighted habitual writing, peer review, and writing for multiple audiences and multiple genres. In just six contact hours, we documented significant increases in students' reporting maintaining a more consistent writing routine and writing environment, revising multiple drafts for writing projects, and being willing to have work reviewed by peers or mentors. Upon completion of both workshops, students reported an increase in their confidence as writers. The development of comprehensive graduate writing programs can be costly and time intensive, but our evaluation demonstrates that significant gains in writing capacity and confidence as writers were made by graduate science students with even a low level of investment. We urge graduate science faculty in all Science Technology Engineering Math disciplines to consider how they might offer this two‐workshop sequence or similar low‐investment interventions that will build writing capacity and confidence as writers and scientists in graduate students. Training on habitual writing, frequent review, and multiple genres can help graduate science students be confident writers and scientists.

There is an increasing demand for emerging scientists to improve their ability to communicate with public audiences, yet little research investigates the effectiveness of science communication training for graduate students. We responded to this need by developing SciWrite@URI—an interdisciplinary model for science graduate students designed around three learning outcomes based on tenets from the field of writing and rhetoric—habitual writing, multiple genres, and frequent review. SciWrite students completed courses and a science communication internship, attended writing workshops, and became tutors at a newly established Graduate Writing Center. After 2 years of training, students more frequently wrote multiple drafts and engaged in peer review, increased their confidence as writers, and decreased their apprehension about writing. We conclude the tenets of the SciWrite program helped students improve as science communicators, and we make suggestions for effective ways graduate departments and training programs might implement and build on our model.

Being a PhD student is not easy.Navigating the highly competitive world of academia while working hard for little or no pay would be stressful for anyone--but it's especially challenging for graduate students who are also parents.

Traditional archival information infrastructure is problematic because it limits the arrangement and description of any artifact to a single interpretation by a single archivist. This approach of one authority defining artifacts lacks mechanisms to effectively convey the rich and complex discourse in which artifacts were originally composed. While researchers have begun to develop feminist methodologies for working with archives after they have been formed, there has not been much attention paid to developing practical methodologies for creating and sustaining a more fluid and multi-voiced archival infrastructure that is also able to overcome traditionally isolating elements such as physical distance. In this dissertation, I introduce a networked methodology called relational architecture to fill critical gaps in current archival practice. I argue that information infrastructures should be anchored by a point of origin, but continually augmented by building connections among resources with relationships identified by contributing-users. Developed from archival practice in rhetoric and composition, inspired by open architecture of application programming interfaces (API) like Twitter, and validated by network theory, relational architecture enables a more flexible information infrastructure that is able to position the archivist as the first of many users rather than singular defining authority of traditional archival theory. I contend that relational architecture is more than simply a functional response to big data in archives, or even a best practice for archivists, but instead is an ethical response to the inherent silencing of the “other” at work in traditional archival process and principles. It addresses many of the gaps in the field’s methodology in specifically in Gesa Kirsch and Patricia A. Sullivan’s Methods and Methodology in Composition Research and tackles some of the challenges of methods and digital tools raised in Ridolfo and Hart-Davidson’s Rhetoric and the Digital Humanities by enabling users to speak back to the code of the information infrastructure itself. I designed and carried out a survey as proof of concept to demonstrate what, exactly, is added to the archive when more users were asked to collaborate in the authoring of the infrastructure itself. Participants contributed folksonomy hashtags (user-generated tags) to digitalized artifacts, and the results of the survey indicate that relational architecture does significantly expand the points of connectivity within the archive. Moreover, this methodology enables the folksonomy hashtags to record knowledge in themselves, thus illustrating and adding the diverse ways of doing and knowing now record in the archives. These results support my argument that relational architecture builds multiple layers of connection into the information infrastructure itself; allows easy access beyond archival or institutional silos; calls for multiple voices to be documented and valued on the official record; enhances transparency and reproducibility; and documents pathways to track and quantify the ways that different communities build and share knowledge. Applicable most directly to archival work, these findings also have direct ramifications for the organization of resources in Writing Program Administration and other related work in the field.