Among the most consequential documents that writers produce in graduate school is the dissertation. Strong mentoring at specific critical junctures in the dissertation process can strengthen both the document itself and graduate students’ abilities to later support their own graduate students. Unfortunately, most faculty receive little to no training about the writing instruction central to the dissertation process, from invention to final deposit. Instead, they rely upon their own experiences producing a doctoral thesis, which might have been problematic and trauma producing or wonderful yet still mystifying. This workshop incorporates current research on graduate student writing and builds on insights about graduate student struggles that the Writing Lab gains through working with dissertation writers.