The purpose of this paper is to highlight the results from the Graduate Writing Institute, a week-long graduate writing workshop at a research-intensive HSI university in the southwest. Sixty-three graduate students who worked on large writing projects, such as theses or dissertations, volunteered to attend one of four separate Writing Institutes. These students took a pre- and post- Writing Inventory of Skills and Preferences (WISP) with significant increases in the WISP scores from pre-test to post-test, which indicated that the non-contextualized, cross-disciplinary content and structure of the Writing Institute successfully increased students' knowledge of academic writing skills, including higher order concerns and lower order concerns. Additionally, evaluation survey results confirmed that attending the Graduate Writing Institute helped students overcome feelings of "academic risk." Providing graduate students working on their thesis/dissertation with this type of specialized learning assistance (non-course based, interdisciplinary, non-contextualized holistic approach to addressing lower order concerns, higher order concerns, and academic risk) in a week long intensive institute with instructional time, peer interaction, individual writing time, and one-on-one writing consultations should be replicated for the benefit of graduate students at other institutions.