Internal alignment in doctoral writing: questions, methods, theory….

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research writing, thesis structure, thesis writing

By Susan Carter

I’m writing this as I prepare a two-hour workshop for a group of doctoral students who mostly work in Education. Our thinking work together will be premised upon an article that I have just read (Twining, Heller, Nussbaum, and Tsai, 2017). If you are able to access this, you’ll have a good resource for doctoral students, who often have difficulty with how they are expected to write about their study’s epistemology and ontology.

I’ve sent this article in advance to the students who’ll be coming to my class, since it devotes a few paragraph to the need for ‘internal alignment’ in research writing. If you cannot access the article, it would still be possible to run a workshop in which doctoral students talk about how their research design links to their epistemological position, and how the bits of their thesis tie logically together within that framework.

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Doctoral writing: How good is good enough?

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final stages of PhD, Staying realistic with writing, writing skills development

By Susan Carter

Commonly there is some uncertainty about when a doctorate is ready for submission. The criteria for a PhD are expressed in rather broad terms. Exactly how patently must critical analysis of literature be demonstrated to reach doctoral standard?  Just how significant must the contribution to knowledge be in a doctoral thesis compared to a masters thesis? How thoroughly must understanding of theory and methodology be shown? This post considers how supervisors and candidates can judge when the doctorate is good enough to face examination.

Scholarship as collaboration: Towards a generous rhetoric

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Emotion & writing, Researcher identity, Writing as social identity; the reader as significant other

By Anthony Paré

Anthony Paré is a Professor at the University of British Columbia. He’s also an inspiring researcher who took a lead in researching doctoral writing, with wise articles based on practice as well as data.

Who is the speaker of academic texts? What is their relationship to readers? With what authority and conviction do they speak? Is their task to contest, criticize, and rebuke, or is it to cooperate, assist, and collaborate? In scholarly practice, and in the training of students, is academic discourse regarded as a field of combat, where opponents’ positions are attacked and one’s own arguments advanced triumphantly? Or do we approach academic writing as a fundamentally social act through which understanding and knowing are built collectively?

Since I believe that knowledge-making is a social enterprise that depends on collaborative work, these are questions I’ve frequently considered over many years of teaching and studying writing, and they were the questions I addressed in my presentation at the recent International Academic Identities Conference in Hiroshima, Japan. The Conference theme was The Peaceful University: Aspirations for academic futures – compassion, generosity, imagination, and creation, a powerful and poignant theme in a city that experienced such horrendous violence in August, 1945. In this blog entry, I offer the written version of that talk.

Christmas reading; doctoral writing in 2019

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Doctoral writing, Researcher identity, talking about writing

By Susan Carter

It’s customary for DoctoralWriting to begin a new year with a post based around that theme: new year’s resolutions for better doctoral writing practice. A new year offers a turning point, an invitation to audit how the previous year played out, and to plan for a productive writing year ahead with renewed energy. Here’s 2017’s new year’s post, 2015’s and 2014’s. In 2016, our new year’s post celebrated and acknowledged guest contributors. These previous year’s reflections are inspiring posts, worth looking at again. Maybe it is reasonable to approach each new year ritualistically: it is not the particularity of each new year that matters, just that each turning point offers again the chance to review and plan ahead.

I’m wondering too whether it is common that when we academics return to work after Christmas, we have spent time reading fiction over the break. In our family, a good book is a common Christmas gift, and the Christmas break is one time of the year when there may be time to read. I find that stories often give me ideas for doctoral writing workshops.

Wrapping up doctoral writing for 2018

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Best doctoral writing posts, Farewell 2018

It seems hard to believe we are coming to the end of our 6^th year of the Doctoral Writing blog.  From a small idea sparked at the Quality in Post Graduate Research (QPR) Conference in Adelaide, Australia, in April 2012, the blog has grown to having over 13,000 followers. We know many people who began reading the blog as doctoral students who now, as graduates and supervisors, recommend the blog to colleagues and new doctoral students. How time flies!

The blog represents an amazing community of doctoral writers and their supporters: supervisors, academic developers, academic language and writing developers, and increasingly we are being supported and connected to other communities via university library and graduate research websites.

Using infographics to communicate your research

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infographics for researchers, Presenting your research visually

This week’s post comes from a graphic designer who works with academics.  Ben approached us when one of his colleagues suggested our readers may value tips on creating infographics to illustrate and promote their research. Ben Brockbank can be contacted on ben@academicinfographic.com.

As this post demonstrates, good infographics offer a fast, effective and eye-catching method of conveying complex information in a more accessible and engaging way.

In the context of research, ‘infographics’ can apply to any number of visual outputs, including presentations, visual reports, illustrations that accompany an article, or scientific diagrams. However, with academic and research infographics, probably the most widely used outputs are the research poster and visual abstract. I’m sure you’re familiar with research posters.

 

Less well-known, are visual abstracts which condense the information from an abstract into a more engaging visual display. Visual abstracts still provide key information but are more flexible and varied in terms of size and content than research posters or traditional written abstracts.

Example of a Visual Abstract