Building peer groups are essential to succeeding as a PhD student. Collaboration helps students understand that writing your dissertation need not be a private lonely experience; rather it can also be a communal process. Your thesis may seem lucid to you, but others when reading your dissertation might find it difficult to understand. This is where peer review can help you. When your peers read your writing they might be able to better advise you on how to improve your writing and make it more engaging for the readers. This can only achieve through effective collaboration. This also helps you to understand that you are writing for an audience not simply for your mentor or dissertation committee. In fact, when you publish your work it will actually be read by the scientific community.

The collaboration will help you understand that writing is a process and that it will take time and effort to master the skills of what is often a very complex and challenging task. During a peer review process, you discuss different writing strategies. This will help you stay motivated and focused on the thesis writing process. Positive feedback during a peer review process is very helpful. Only constructive criticism will help you to analyze your own writing and figure out flaws in sentence construction or logical reasoning. Is the thesis not persuasive enough? Are the paragraphs not coherent or logically placed? Are the sentences not focused and crisp? It also helps one to understand the expectations of the audience. Also, it is important to understand the structure and format of an academic discourse. Only conversations can give the writers a thorough understanding of the thesis writing conventions, which the student had previously neglected or not understood.

Collaboration can be done in several ways. It is most frequently done in small groups. Today technology has allowed the collaboration of people through Skype video calls or other video conferencing software. As a result, you need not be on the same campus or the same coffee shop, but you can still discuss valuable things and bounce off different ideas with each other. The collaboration will give rise to multiple points of view on a similar topic, this will allow your thesis writing to be sharper and well-rounded. It is best not to be defensive about feedbacks. If you can refer to the comment while reading your thesis, you get a better understanding of how to write your thesis effectively.