Every spring, the Campus Writing and Speaking Program (CWSP) runs into the same problem that most faculty development programs face in March and April: everyone agrees that scholarly writing matters, but almost no one has time for it. For many instructors, the writing projects that matter most to their professional growth—the half-drafted article, the grant proposal that needs another pass, the book chapter sitting untouched since January—quietly slide further down the priority list.
Spring Wolfpack Writes is CWSP’s attempt to interrupt that pattern. Running March 30 through April 5, the free program asks participants to commit to just 20 to 30 minutes of daily writing on their own scholarly or creative projects for seven consecutive days. The emphasis on “their own” is deliberate and important: challenge writing means research articles, grant proposals, dissertations, book manuscripts, conference papers and creative projects.
“Spring semester presents its own unique rhythms and demands. By late March, many of us are feeling the weight of the semester — grading is accumulating, and summer still feels like a distant horizon,” said CWSP Co-Director Kirsti Cole. “We designed the spring challenge to honor that reality: intensive, focused, and genuinely achievable. It’s a sprint, not a marathon. When fall arrives, and bandwidth expands, we return to the full 14-day format.”
It does not include course preparation, grading, committee reports, email or other institutional obligations, regardless of how pressing they feel. The distinction matters because one of the challenge’s core premises is that faculty at all ranks tend to treat their own intellectual work as the thing that can always wait, and CWSP is trying to push back against that habit, even if only for a week.
How the Program Evolved
The fall 2025 version of Wolfpack Writes was offered as a 14-day challenge and drew 101 participants and had a 98 percent completion rate across every college and a total of 70 departments. Assessment data from that cohort, however, revealed that the spring semester presents meaningfully different constraints. Faculty reported higher levels of exhaustion by late March, less schedule flexibility, and more competing deadlines than they experienced in October.
✅ 101 participants
✅ 98% completion rate
✅ Faculty across ALL colleges
Rather than simply repeating the fall format, CWSP redesigned the spring challenge as a compressed seven-day sprint, with completion defined as writing five or more of those seven days. The shorter timeline is a response to what participants actually said about their spring capacity, not a scaling back of ambition.
The participant base has been broad from the start. Fall 2025 included professional faculty at every rank, teaching faculty, postdoctoral scholars, graduate students working on dissertations and theses, and professional staff with scholarly projects. The challenge is open to anyone at NC State with a writing project that would benefit from sustained daily attention. CWSP deliberately avoided framing it as something intended primarily for research-intensive faculty to ensure its availability to the entire NC State community. An instructor revising a pedagogical article, a staff member drafting a white paper and a doctoral candidate working through dissertation revisions all belong in the same cohort.
Daily Structure and Support
Each morning during the challenge week, participants receive an email built around that day’s theme. Day one focuses on goal-setting and asks writers to identify one specific project and one concrete objective for the week. Day two addresses the practical challenge of protecting writing time from competing demands. Day three falls on April Fool’s Day and takes an honest look at the rationalizations academics commonly use to defer writing — “I’ll start when things calm down,” “I need a full day to make real progress,” “I work better under deadline pressure” — and why those stories tend not to hold up under scrutiny. Subsequent days address mid-week resistance, capitalize on momentum, plan for summer productivity and reflect on what the week produced.
The emails are more conversational and personality-driven than typical institutional communication, a deliberate choice by CWSP. The reasoning is that daily writing support emails need to be something people actually read rather than archive, and that the emotional realities of writing — frustration, resistance, self-doubt, the satisfaction of a paragraph that finally works — deserve direct acknowledgment rather than bureaucratic distance. That said, the underlying strategies are grounded in writing studies research, and every email includes a clearly marked daily mission for participants who prefer to skip the narrative framing and get straight to the task.
Beyond the emails, participants have access to a shared resource folder containing a SMART goals worksheet for setting their weekly objective, a daily tracking log designed to take about 30 seconds per entry, a collection of more than 50 writing prompts for days when facing the main project feels impossible, and a comprehensive peer partnership guide. CWSP also hosts drop-in writing sessions at Hunt Library on Wednesdays (9 a.m. – noon) and Hill Library on Fridays (9 a.m. – noon), plus a virtual write-in mid-week. These sessions are quiet, focused environments with coffee provided — participants bring their laptops and work on their own projects alongside colleagues doing the same. Attendance is optional, and many participants complete the full challenge writing from home or their offices.
Peer Accountability Partnerships
One of the most significant additions to the spring challenge is a facilitated peer-matching system, developed in response to fall assessment findings. When asked what contributed most to their success, fall participants overwhelmingly cited peer accountability. Eighty-nine percent of those who checked in regularly with a writing partner completed every challenge day, and the completion gap between partnered and solo participants was substantial.
“People with accountability partners are 65 percent more likely to achieve their goals than those working alone,” said Cole.
The matching process pairs participants based on project type, preferred communication method and frequency, scheduling constraints, and whether they’d prefer a partner in their own discipline or from a different field. CWSP provides a detailed partnership guide that covers first-contact templates, multiple check-in formats ranging from a 30-second daily text to structured writing sprints, guidance for adjusting the partnership mid-week if something isn’t working, and protocols for ending a partnership gracefully if the match turns out to be a poor fit.
Participants can also self-select a partner from an opt-in list or participate solo. The program doesn’t pressure anyone into a partnership, but it does make accountability data transparent so people can make informed decisions about what’s likely to help them finish.
What the Fall Data Showed
The fall 2025 assessment provides a useful baseline for understanding how the challenge affects participants. Beyond the 98 percent completion rate, 89 percent of participants reported improved writing habits that persisted after the challenge ended, and many described the experience as the first time they had written consistently during a semester in years. Forty percent reported measurable increases in their writing productivity in the months following the challenge. Ninety-five percent said they would recommend the program to a colleague.
The qualitative feedback was equally telling. Participants described the challenge as helping them reframe daily writing from an aspiration into a concrete, achievable practice. Several noted that the experience of writing for 20 minutes on a difficult day — and discovering that 20 minutes still produced something useful — changed their relationship with their own writing process in lasting ways. In many cases, peer partnerships continued well beyond the challenge period.
Connection to Broader CWSP Programming
Spring Wolfpack Writes is not a standalone event. It feeds into a broader ecosystem of writing support that CWSP maintains year-round, including weekly community writing sessions at Hunt and Hill Libraries, PagexPage manuscript development groups for sustained small-group accountability, and the Summer Writing Retreat, for which challenge completers receive priority registration.
The fall challenge returns October 20 through November 2, 2026, in its full 14-day format. CWSP’s goal is to build a culture at NC State in which faculty writing is treated as a regular professional practice, supported by institutional infrastructure, not as something individuals are expected to figure out on their own in whatever time is left over after teaching, service and administration.
Participants who complete the spring challenge receive a certificate of completion documenting their days written and total minutes, suitable for inclusion in annual reviews, CVs and tenure and promotion materials under professional development. The end-of-challenge survey takes five to seven minutes and provides CWSP with feedback to refine future programming.
Registration
Registration is open now. Faculty, staff, postdocs and graduate students across all colleges are welcome. Contact Kirsti Cole, CWSP co-director with questions, or visit the CWSP website for registration and program details.
