student writing

[Harlow2]

Vid,  my experience is that some students want to learn to do this and others will let a professor do their work for them and pay little attention to comments. LarryC had a great phrase:  we can't care about their work more than they do.  If that means their thesis languishes, so be it.

[pgher]

I'm also in engineering and dealing with a student who may never finish his thesis. I think people drift into engineering because they don't want to write. It's a feedback loop: they choose life experiences (e.g. classes) to avoid writing, so they never develop the skill, so they become scared to try.

It's perhaps the flip side of math phobia that drives people into non-math fields.

[Puget]

Have you tried actually talking WITH (not AT) your student(s) about this? Ask in a non-judgmental way "what are your barriers to writing?" "what about this process is most challenging?" "what would be helpful for me to do as a mentor?"
I have these conversations with my students often, and they usually have good insights and ideas.

I also run a weekly writing group for my own grad students and others in the department, where we set weekly writing goals and check in on progress, as a way to provide social accountability and normalize the goal of writing every work day.

I'd also suggest the books How to Write A Lot by Paul Silvia and The Writing Workshop: Write More, Write Better and Be Happier by Barbara Sarnecka. Both are aimed at grad students and above in the sciences. The first is very short and focuses on just what the title says. The second is more extensive and covers both productivity strategies (my students have found the chapter on writing resistance particularly helpful) and improving writing (with a focus on empirical journal articles in the sciences). Both are highly readable, engaging, and often funny.

[mleok]

I would not invest that kind of time on revising/rewriting a student's work unless I was a coauthor on the paper.