Notable Author: Sonja Foss
Scholar loves to write and teach others to write
By Leanne Silverman

Of the three major responsibilities held by academics—teaching, research/writing, and service—Sonja Foss said her favorite is writing. Nevertheless, this communication professor at the University of Colorado Denver also harbors a long-held passion for teaching that has found outlet in classrooms around the country as well as in the form of dissertation workshops, “scholars’ retreats” and one-on-one coaching.

“The very first day of first grade, my sister and I came home from school and told our mother we wanted to be teachers,” said Foss. Her initial interest in teaching high school language evolved, once she went to college, into a desire to teach both at a higher level and to students in their native tongue. In quick succession, she earned a BA in Romance Languages (1972) and a MA in Rhetoric and Public Address (1973) from the University of Oregon, then a Ph.D. in Communication Studies (1976) from Northwestern University.

Balancing her career with that of her husband, Foss has taught around the country. She spent time at Virginia Tech and Norfolk State before landing at the University of Denver. Further moves took her back to the University of Oregon (where she earned tenure in 1988), St. Louis University, and Ohio State. The couple returned to Colorado in 1996, and Foss was hired as full professor at the University of Colorado Denver the following year.

Over the years, Foss has published 10 books, including Rhetorical Criticism: Exploration and Practice (now in its 4th edition), Feminist Rhetorical Theories, and Destination Dissertation: A Traveler’s Guide to a Done Dissertation, as well as nearly 50 articles and book chapters. She is also a strong believer in collaborative writing: nine of her books and 20 of her articles are co-authored.

“I find it so much more interesting to hammer things out and talk them through with someone,” she said. “Even if I’m writing by myself, I’ll often run my ideas by other people. Co-authoring just formalizes that process. By co-authoring, you can develop better ideas than you would come up with by yourself. The trick is to really stay open. Don’t close yourself off from the resource that is that other person and their ideas.” She also suggests meeting your co-author in the same physical location when you initiate work: “It’s just easier to work out the ideas when you’re together, then go off and write on your own. “

In the mid-1990s, Foss began offering “Scholars’ Retreats” for graduate students struggling to complete their theses and dissertations, as well as professors working on other writing projects. These retreats provide academics with intensive, focused, and supervised writing time as well as on-call motivation and advice ranging from developing more productive writing strategies, coding qualitative data efficiently, and organizing ideas. Foss now co-directs the retreats with Dr. William Waters, an assistant professor of English at the University of Houston-Downtown and a “graduate” of one of the early retreats.

The idea for the retreats began very close to home, Foss said: “My husband had done all his doctorate coursework, but then he took a full-time job and wasn’t getting his dissertation done.” Foss encouraged him take two weeks during which he set aside everything else when he came home from work. He wrote and—this was before computers—she typed. “He essentially got the draft done in two weeks,” she said. “That showed me that you can get a lot done in a short amount of time.”

In addition to the scholars’ retreats, Foss and Waters also present “Destination Dissertation: Practical Strategies for Writing the Thesis or Dissertation” and “Sharing Results: Crafting an Article.” These workshops cover everything from conceptualizing ideas and developing explanatory schema to efficient writing and how to manage your competing social roles (such as “scholar,” “employee,” and “parent”). And for scholars who prefer a one-on-one approach, they offer individual coaching to facilitate writing progress.

“People make the process of writing so painful, but it doesn’t have to be!” said Foss. “William and I say it takes about six-and-a-half months to do your dissertation from start to finish. You can do that six-and-a-half months in six-and-a-half months, or you can spread it over three or six years—but it really only takes about that amount of time.”

One of the core problems Foss and Waters see people having is lack of alignment among the key pieces of an article or dissertation. “For example, they’ll have a research question, but data that can’t answer that question,” she said. “Or the way they outlined their chapters doesn’t make any sense in light of their method.” Consequently, they often have to help people modify their projects “to get those things to line up.” Sometimes those modifications can be traumatic, Foss said, “but most of the time it is a huge relief. People know they are stuck but they don’t know why.”

Foss shared this advice for writing articles:

Match your writing to the formula of the journal. “Take several articles from the journal and figure out the average length,” she said. “An easy way to do this is to count paragraphs and then figure out the major sections of the article and the percentage of words devoted to each. “By doing so, you’re really figuring out the deep structure of the piece,” she said.

Once you’ve identified the basic structure of articles in the journal and the vocabulary most often used, don’t be afraid to mimic them. “If the findings generally take up three-quarters of the article, your findings should take up three-quarters of your article,” she said. “When reviewers read your piece, it should look like something that they know. It should match the formula and structure and tone they’ve got in their heads. The process is simple but it’s amazing how people don’t try very hard to match an article to a journal in terms of both content and style. But you’ve got to!”

When she’s not conducting workshops and retreats or working on her own writing, Foss enjoys sewing, gardening, and contemporary art. She lives in Denver, CO with her husband, but they make time to head to Greece whenever possible.


Leanne Silverman hung her shingle as a freelance writer and editor in Denver, CO after leaving a 12-year career in academic publishing.