Extended Abstract: Café and support: Overcoming writer’s isolation during COVID-19 and beyond

Abstract

Students have needed to communicate professionally in various contexts this past year, just as students have always needed to do. They still prepared pre-doctoral proposals, abstracts for online conferences, research articles, theses, dissertations, etc. We say still because it is important to remember that while COVID 19 placed the world in quarantine, professionally, those who could, tried to keep moving ahead. And yet, effective written communication has long been established as a creature that creates loneliness and anxiety [1] . Even before COVID, countless workshops and writing retreats had been offered around the world for graduate students [2] . This difficulty, both before and during COVID, is the reason we attempted to support young academic writers and students struggling with the monolith task of academic and scientific writing.