Writing skills and post-PhD employment

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employability, post-PhD life, writing skills

By Cally Guerin

Researcher development workshops are increasingly focused on what is learnt during the doctorate that graduates take into their non-academic jobs on graduation.  Here at DoctoralWriting we usually concentrate on the kind of writing that is undertaken during the doctorate, but much of that is building a skillset that is invaluable outside the academy too. The writing skills developed during a PhD are right up there at the top of the list of desirable skills that employers are looking for.

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Embrace the ethics application – it’s writing time well spent

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audience, ethics application, genre

By Cally Guerin

I hear lots of groans when the issue of writing an ethics application is mentioned. For some this feels like a tedious task that is yet another bureaucratic requirement in a system that seems to thrive on endless electronic forms and paperwork. However, I truly believe that ethic applications are a valuable tool for thinking through the details of a research project in the design stage. Doing the hard work at the beginning will head off many of the problems of poorly thought through research – and, of course, ensure that the research itself is thoroughly ethical. An added benefit is the skill development of learning to write for a range of different audiences.

It’s not over until it’s over: writing a doctoral graduation citation

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graduation citation, Researcher identity

Today’s guest bloggers, Ana María Benton and Ian Brailsford, write to us from New Zealand. Ana María Benton holds a doctoral degree in education and is a language learning adviser within English Language Enrichment  (Libraries and Learning Services: Te Tumu Herenga) at the University of Auckland. She has long worked with university students and is passionate about language planning, second language education, and language revitalization. Ian Brailsford is an assistant with the University of Auckland’s Specials Collections (Libraries and Learning Services: Te Tumu Herenga) and was previously employed as a postgraduate learning adviser working primarily with doctoral candidates. Here they explain the identity work involved in writing the citation that is read out at New Zealand graduation ceremonies for PhD candidates.

By Drs Ana Maria Benton Zavala and Ian Brailsford

Introduction

This blog post describes the final piece of doctoral writing for a recently awarded PhD: the brief citation read out at graduation. Conventional wisdom is that the thesis abstract is the final (and possibly hardest) piece of writing. At our University, the official guidelines stipulate that abstracts be no more than 350 words. This equates to approximately three to four years’ full-time doctoral study honed down to three to four paragraphs. Good advice on writing the abstract is out there; this post attempts the same for a citation.

Re-Imagining Doctoral Writing: An Agenda for Research

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call for papers, innovations in writing, research into writing, writing scholarship

Our guest post this week is by an international group of scholars working at three different institutions: Cecile Badenhorst is an Associate Professor in the Adult Education/Post-Secondary program in the Faculty of Education at Memorial University, Newfoundland, Canada; Brittany Amell is a PhD student at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada; and on the other side of the world, James Burford is a Lecturer in the Research Education and Development unit in the Graduate Research School, La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. Here they tell us about their new project on “Re-Imagining Doctoral Writing” and invite readers to contribute to their forthcoming book on the topic. All three have published extensively on the topic of doctoral writing.

By Cecile Badenhorst, Brittany Amell & James Burford

Over recent years, doctoral writing has become an increasingly important practice to institutions, policymakers, and doctoral education programs worldwide. Frequently positioned as a site of  “risk” and “trouble”, doctoral writing is commonly seen as a key location for institutional regulation and surveillance, supervisory anxiety, and student concern. It is now clear that to describe doctoral writing as a domain that is “under-considered” or “under-discussed” would be to miss the shelves of books in most university libraries about how doctoral students might write, and how supervisors (and others involved in doctoral teaching) might teach writing.

To make such a statement would also be to miss the rich collection of public fora where the discussion of doctoral writing identities, practices, policies and pedagogies takes place (e.g. DoctoralWriting, Thesis Whisperer and Patter), and the rise of initiatives like #AcWriMo (Academic Writing Month) which bring academic writers together.

Despite this wide array of exciting developments in the field of doctoral writing, as scholars who research in this area we continue to have some fundamental concerns that we are pondering and puzzling over.

Some misconceptions about Literature Reviews

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literature review, managing your writing energy, reading

By Cally Guerin

We’ve written about literature reviews before: see, for example, Trust yourself, Demonstrating criticality, and Writing while still uncertain. But there is always something more to say about these sections of the thesis that are so challenging for most doctoral writers. I was reminded again recently of just how big a source of anxiety this can be for novice researchers who feel overwhelmed by the amount of information they feel required to absorb. In the following, I debunk some of the main misconceptions that seem to hobble doctoral writers; in the process, I hope to offer reassurance that the task is more manageable than it can feel at times.

Designing a new doctoral research project and factoring in writing

Tags

Desire to write, Doctoral writing, Precision, Researcher identity

By Susan Carter

This afternoon I am meeting a new doctoral candidate I’ll be supervising, and I’ve already sent her a set of questions in advance of meeting. Before we begin working as a team with the other supervisor to design the doctoral project and start writing seriously, I want the candidate to do some thinking. Mostly, it’s she who must ensure that we do not get side-tracked by talk of methods, methodology, and theory from focussing on what is central: the candidate as someone already with a life that we want this doctorate to improve.

I’ve drawn these questions up, and filed them away knowing that this will be another useful document for sharing with other academics and using again myself.