Remote supervision of doctoral writers became the norm in 2020 when university campuses around the world suddenly closed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. For some supervisors the rapid move to online supervision signalled a radical shift in their approach to working with PhD candidates, but for others it has been a smooth extension of their existing supervisory practices. By bringing together scholarly works and selected grey literature on remote supervision of doctoral writing, this paper explores how we might understand best practices for developing doctoral writing at a distance.