Writing back to reviewers, assessors and examiners

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responding to examiners and reviewers, Writing rejoinders and responses

By Claire Aitchison

Writing a thesis is only one of numerous writing tasks in doctoral candidature. Writing for a reading audience across multiple forms (journal articles, social media, grant applications and so on) is increasingly expected of doctoral scholarship – and this also means learning how to respond to feedback and critique.

This post for supervisors and candidates focuses on the often-occluded practices of writing rejoinders for grant applications, scholarly journal reviews and PhD examiner reports. I acknowledge what we’d like to say – and what we should!

Writing to your audience – consider the examiner

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audience in writing

By Claire Aitchison

The regular advice to doctoral candidates to write with their audience in mind usually refers to a generalised notion of who the examiner might be. We’ve long advocated that reader-awareness ought to be incorporated into thesis writing since this practice requires the writer to step out of their own shoes and to (re)consider how the text will be read by another. To see the writing from a different perspective is a useful tool for testing how meaning may be interpreted. Seeking feedback from supervisors, peers and critical friends helps to refine audience-awareness, however, examiners are the penultimate readers of the doctoral output since they are charged with assessing its merits. For doctoral candidates, their views matter the most.   

“Taming the baggy thesis monster”, or how to tighten up your writing

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reducing word count, thesis editing, thesis structure

Last month I ran an editing boot camp aimed at helping late-stage doctoral writers whip their theses into shape. My late dear friend, Heather Kerr, used to talk about the ‘large, loose, baggy monsters’ that PhD candidates often confront towards the end of candidature. The phrase comes from Henry James when describing big 19^th-century novels, and seems particularly apt for those doctoral candidates who have been writing and writing for several (sometimes way too many) years. The boot camp was designed to tame those baggy monsters into tightly argued, concisely written documents ready to submit for examination. Here I outline four exercises we used to achieve this.

Presubmission revision checklist for doctoral monographs

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Doctoral revision, presubmission

By Susan Carter

I’m working with several doctoral students who are approaching submission deadlines, so careful revision is much on my mind. There are a few things I am picking up across their work, and I wondered if maybe there are common considerations so that a checklist would be helpful.

My list below relates to what I am doing here and now, and is limited by that—what I’m thinking about now. I’m sure that there is more to be said, and would love it if thoughts about revision checklists surfaced in your own ideas and teaching to add to advice. You could add a comment, or contact us if you could offer a blog post on the same topic: presubmission revision.

Cally Guerin has written before in this blog about presubmission with a focus on formatting, and Claire Aitchison had acknowledged the psychological stress of the presubmission state that seems inevitable, but this post focuses on the seemingless endless checking that revision entails.

A, the, an or some? Articles with abstract nouns in doctoral writing

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writing skills development, English language writing skills

By Susan Carter

Whenever I correct articles in doctoral writing, I get tangled trying to explain why, and often, like now, can only conclude that English is a sod of a language with tricky slithery rules that you simply have to learn and apply. Rules with English grammar do not always have an apparent logic. Those little prefixes to nouns, the troupe of articles, are as troublesome for many doctoral writers as getting journal articles published is for others.

It’s quite hard sometimes deciding whether a noun needs an article, and which one it might need. That is because many nouns in research writing are abstract, sometimes influenced by theory. It’s sometimes hard to tell whether abstracts are countable or uncountable, for example.  This post grapples with the task of suggesting how to make those ‘to article or not to article’ decisions.

Creative arts and industries: the practice-based arts voice

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authorial voice, English language writing skills, thesis writing, writing style

By Susan Carter with Fiona Lamont

Fiona Lamont is a Research Services Advisor at the University of Auckland. Her job entails assistance to researchers, and often these are doctoral writers.

Over the Covid 19 lockdown in New Zealand, Fiona and I (mostly Fiona) facilitated a digital workshop for students from the University of Auckland’s Creative Arts and Industry Faculty (CAI). That faculty spans disciplines where practice, performance or the production of artefacts make up the majority of the candidate’s original contribution. But candidates must also submit a dissertation or exegesis.

The need to write a doctoral dissertation when you are a skilled musician, artist, dancer, choreographer or architect means crossing semiotic systems, and that can be a frustration. To what extent could that dissertation itself map onto the creative work? Structure and voice in writing seem like the dimensions where the best fit between creative practice and text could be considered.