By Susan Carter
To what extent should those of us who support doctoral writing aim to help candidates to write succinctly, clearly and with a control that makes reading smooth and even pleasurable? I puzzle over that, aware of what a marathon writing task the thesis presents, how emotionally challenging doctoral writing can be, how life can throw study off-centre and what an extraordinary amount of diligence has often gone into learning English as an additional language to the level of fluency and sophistication required at doctoral level. Might it demoralize doctoral writers to include tips about further authorial skill with feedback on content, structure, and ideas?
I’d really welcome your opinions. My own inclination is towards teaching for style because I believe that enhanced writing skill is a huge benefit, and yet I know wonderful academics who argue that, in the busyness of academic survival, just focusing on getting something submittable is a sustainable approach.
These people may be right and I could be overly idealistic to want to teach doctoral students to write more accessibly and stylishly. Maybe the point is, as it usually is, to check with students as to what they want.
I am really sympathetic to how pressured doctoral lives can be, and still point out to candidates that examiners are more likely to be favorable and articles are more likely to be published when writing is pleasurable to read in its own right. This may be especially true for those in Social Science and Arts and Humanities, but I would also argue that being smoothly written and thus easy to read matters in all disciplines. I suspect that the same idea, data and argument will more likely get approval from the discourse community when readers find them accessible by merit of good quality writing. And maybe academic writing becomes less onerous, demoralizing and life-consuming when there are sentences that give the author pride and pleasure.
In this post I am drawing on Helen Sword’s research into guides on academic writing. She surveyed over 100 guides and came up with six points that they agreed on (Sword, 2012: 26-27):
- Clarity, Coherence, Concision: Strive to produce sentences that are clear, coherent and concise…the “three C’s” are mentioned in some form in most of the style guides…
- Short or Mixed-Length Sentences: Keep sentences short and simple, or vary your sentences by alternating longer sentences with shorter ones
- Plain English: avoid ornate, pompous, Latinate or waffly prose
- Precision: Avoid vagueness and imprecision
- Active verbs: Avoid passive verb constructions or use them sparingly; active verbs should predominate
- Telling a story: Create a compelling narrative
Before itemizing this list, Sword gives examples of sentences that are challenging for readers, and yet quite typical in doctoral prose, and, alas, many published articles. This is not a name and shame situation: she doesn’t give references, but says that these examples come from her own database of published journal articles. Do you know doctoral writers who might produce sentences like this? And do you suggest ways to improve for clarity? Should you?
Rarely is there an effective conceptual like between the current understandings of the centrality of text to knowledge production and student learning and the pragmatic problems of policy imperatives in the name of efficiency and capacity-building (cited in Sword, 2012: 5).
Are you certain as a reader that you know exactly what this author means? I agree with Sword that if such a sentence could be split into shorter ones, perhaps with concrete examples, so that a reader is able to be certain of what is meant, that revision work is worth doing. I also believe that such revision skills are well learned.
Here are three exercises from Sword that could be offered to doctoral students who want a route to stylish academic writing.
Voice and audience
Thinking about voice, write down the names of five real people. They should be:
- A top expert in your field, one you’d like to impress
- A close colleague in your discipline who you would trust to give you honest feedback
- An academic friend from outside your discipline
- An advanced undergraduate from your discipline
- An intelligent non-academic friend or relative.
Then read a passage of your writing aloud to imagine each person’s response. Revise the writing so that each one would understand you, stay interested, and want to read on (adapted from Sword, 2012: 46-47). That is sound advice for teaching how to produce clear readable prose, and it takes writers along the road to pleasure as well as clarity.
Lively verbs
For livelier sentences, try changing some of the ‘to be’ verbs to active, vivid verbs—Sword gives ‘sway, shun and masquerade’ as examples (Sword, 2012: 60), and you find many more if you read her other publications (e.g., Sword, 2007, 2008, 2009). Her own writing demonstrates her points.
Possible agents governing verbs
Then ‘make sure that at least one sentence per paragraph includes a concrete noun, or human entity as its subject, immediately followed by an active verb. Some examples are “Merleau-Ponty argues…”; “Students believe…”; “International banks compete….” Sword makes the case too that because abstract nouns are hard for readers to envision, “Where possible, explain abstract concepts using concrete examples” (Sword, 2012: 61).
Modelling on exemplars
Find an author whose work you find really engaging and a pleasure to read. Then look closely and analytically at how the writing achieves this. What strategies can you find, perhaps just in the opening paragraph, that you could adopt in your own writing (Sword, 2012: 85)? How are paragraphs organized so that readers follow through the logic of an argument being steadily built? Once the grammatical bones of a good article are traced, it becomes possible to model structure on the well-written exemplar.
I’m closing here with a request again for comments. What are your views on teaching doctoral students to write stylishly?
References
Sword, H. (2007). The writer’s diet. Auckland: Pearson Education NZ.
Sword, H. (2008). The longitudinal archive. International Journal for Academic Development, 13(2), 87-96.
Sword, H. (2009). Writing higher education differently: a manifesto on style. Studies in Higher Education, 34(3), 319-336.
Sword, H. (2012). Stylish Academic Writing. Cambridge, Mass.; London, England: Harvard University Press.
Pingback: Who’s in your hero folder? – Becoming a PhD supervisor
Thanks for this great post, Susan. You make a really important point here that students are not just writing to get over a hurdle, but hopefully to get published. Also, whatever career students go into in the future, they can only benefit from becoming better writers. The concept of the hero folder is another strategy to use, explained here on my blog: becoming a phd supervisor
Hi Susan
Normally just a “lurker” and a fan of this blog (I can’t count how many times I have forwarded the link to colleagues and students), this time I feel compelled to comment>
Writing with style is great. Surely we all want that.
But I suggest you distinguish between writing with style in your first language and writing with style in an additional language.
This is something I know a little about. Not because I have worked with countless EAL graduate students during my career (which I have) …
But rather, because I am a more or less fluent speaker of French, having studied the language formally for years and having lived and worked in France for about 2 years many years ago and keeping my French alive through contacts with French-speaking friends around the world ….
Yet, as an applied linguist, I think I could say that I am a proficient speaker of the language. But I would not wish to have a conversation in French about my research interests – I simply am not capable of it.
Again, while I can draft a letter in French, and write an email without recourse to a dictionary, the idea of writing a PhD thesis in French is absolutely unthinkable.
So the idea of developing a sense of style in my academic written French is, for me, unthinkable.
I say all this not to deny anything of what you have said. I LOVE Helen Sword’s work and wish I didn’t find it so difficult to write the way she suggests. I am sure we all would love to produce academic prose like hers …
But I think we need to stop a moment and take our hats off to our EAL doctoral students who are able to produce a PhD thesis in a language other than the one they grew up with, even if it is not expressed as “stylishly” as it might be.
Dear Sarah,
You have put your finger exactly on what I struggle with: whether to think ‘this is someone doing something extraordinarily valiant in a second or third language, so it would be cruel to keep getting my supervisees to continually upskill: once they get to good enough,I’ll just applaud in admiration and envy” or whether to think “this is an extraordinarily clever, talented, and committed researcher: I should try to take them further by pointing out how to get clarity and succinct readable prose right from the beginning so that they graduate at their highest possible level.” My hat is ALWAYS off to EAL doctoral students. I know that it is a privilege, and one of the rich pleasures that life has afforded me, to work with them. I just find it hard to decide which is the most ethical and respectful way to go. And most of my EAL doctoral students are keen to aim for stylishness, perhaps because they are extraordinarily high achievers.
I would love to learn to write more stylishly and wish this was an on-going part of my academic training. I am in the final few months of writing up my PhD and feel a bit sad that I probably won’t have enough time to pay attention to style in my writing. Though I am now inspired to try and craft a few thoughtful an stylish paragraphs here and there as little treats for my examiner 🙂 Thank you for the post!
Pingback: Doctoral writing: Exercises for stylish writing | Learning Change
Great tips. I’ve shared this post on my Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/WritingSuccessToday).
Pingback: Resources – Writing Tutor Matthew Huseby, M.A.
Dear Susan,
Many thanks for this website. I found it very useful while writing my dissertation. One point though: I ran the test on writersdiet.com It diagnosed my writing “flabby” and my supervisor’s “heart attack”. Then I tried with a text from Camus, which is an author known to be very concise in writing. He came out “heart attack”. I tried the same text after a while from a different IP number via VPN, appeared “flabby”. So, I find the suggestions alll very useful but strongly recommend taking a second look at the test.
All the best,
mehmet
Thanks for reporting on your experience. Last time I did this, verbs, adjectives and adverbs were deemed trim and fit, whereas nouns were heart attack category. That’s because when I write in Higher Education, most of what I write about is abstract, like ‘doctoral writing’ not concrete. Certainly, what you have here is an algorithm rather than a human being–it’s humans who have a wide understanding of the nuances of language. Best wishes with your scholarship. Susan