How many research languages do you speak? (The answer may surprise you)

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Academic languages and registers, Research languages

Our guest blogger this week is Ailsa Naismith, a third-year PhD student at the University of Bristol, England. Ailsa is researching the active Fuego volcano in Guatemala through satellite imagery and interviews, looking to discover why the volcano erupts and how previous eruptions have been experienced by local people. We have thoroughly enjoyed her thought-provoking reflections on “research languages”—and we’re sure you will too. 

Ailsa can be found on Twitter (@AilsaNaismith) and through the occasional blog post (www.reasoningwithvolcanoes.com).

What language do you do research in? If you’re reading this, there’s a good chance that it’s English, this being the “lingua franca” of much of the academic world. So far, so conventional. But – wait! Could it be that you are secretly more talented than you think? (Based on the overwhelming proportion of doctoral students that reportedly experience Imposter Syndrome, versus what it actually takes to achieve a PhD, the answer is probably “Yes”.)

Despite our fears and reservations, throughout the years we spend studying we learn a wide range of research skills, from communicating our ideas with confidence, through networking, to presenting our arguments clearly in written form. I think these skills can be viewed as a group of “languages” in which we become fluent during our training.

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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.

5 myths about doctoral writing

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academic writing misconceptions, literature review, writing conclusions, writing style

By Cally Guerin

Over the years I’ve noticed that doctoral writers sometimes come to their work with unhelpful ideas about what makes for good academic writing. Today I’d like to bust a few of those myths so that researchers can produce the kind of writing that is required, without going down the paths that waste time or obscure the central messages of the writing.

1. Nothing new in the Conclusion

One of the misconceptions that disrupts good thesis writing is the idea that there must be nothing new in the Conclusion.

Learning how to theorise data in doctoral writing

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Legitimation Code Theory, semantic gravity, theorising data

In this post our guest blogger, Kirstin Wilmot, explains how her research into thesis writing provides insights into how students can learn to move effectively between concrete data and abstract theorising. She uses the concept of ‘semantic gravity’ from Legitimation Code Theory to explore this movement in doctoral theses. Kirstin is a final year PhD student in the Department of Sociology and Social Policy at the University of Sydney.

By Kirstin Wilmot

Theorising data in PhD research is a daunting task. It’s easy to get lost in the wilderness of data, and when the commonly given advice is to just ‘apply theory to your data’, it’s easy to see where anxiety creeps in. What does ‘theorising’ even involve?

There is little consensus on how to theorise. Most studies tend to adopt a focus on the importance of using theory in research, but don’t provide much guidance on how to actually apply theory to data.

I have used ‘semantic gravity’ from Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) to better understand the theorising process.

Precision with word choice in doctoral writing

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Accuracy with word choice; staying realistic with writing, writing skills development

By Susan Carter

In the latest doctoral writing group, we blitzed words that were the cause of inaccuracy, often because the tone they added was too informal. This post gives our list of words that are treacherous. We welcome comments or offers of posts that identify more words that might be tricky. Here are words that we think should be used with caution by doctoral writers.

Firstly, ‘very’ probably does not have a place in a thesis. (Please add a comment if you disagree.) I’d recommend ‘significant’ as an alternative, one that may require a little rephrasing.

Myriad is a tricky word. My Shorter Oxford Dictionary (SOD) says that literally a myriad is ten thousand, and can also mean countless numbers, hordes. So whenever I read that there are myriads of challenges, I replace ‘myriads of’ with ‘many.’ So in that case, the problem is wild overstatement. Wild overstatement is acceptable in many circles, those inhabited by people who like to shriek “OMG!” often, and declare that they would die rather than revise their chapter again. However, the academic community tends not to be like that and can be disapproving. It is better to stay within the reality factor.

The Perfect Coat: Form and Function in Thesis Writing

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Wring style, writing structure

By Dr Anaise Irvine (Auckland University of Technology) and Dr Ian Brailsford (University of Auckland)

Anaise works as a researcher development coordinator at Auckland University of Technology, ensuring that the university offers opportunities for researchers to develop their skills. She has been providing writing tips via AUT’s Thesislink blog for a few years, and gives writing feedback to all students who submit abstracts for AUT’s Postgraduate Symposium. Ian works as a postgraduate learning adviser at the University of Auckland, supporting postgraduate student learning. He has had a long career working with postgrad students in mostly workshop and orientation sessions.

In her new book Developing Research Writing: A Handbook for Supervisors and Advisors (co-edited with Susan Carter), Deborah Laurs points out that learning advisors like ourselves “see many more instances of postgraduate writing than any one supervisor” (p.43). While supervisors become well-versed in the writing standards of their discipline, we witness the writing struggles that occur across disciplines. This equips us to engage in ‘big picture’ thinking about principles of good academic writing that transcend disciplinary norms.

We find it useful to translate these big picture ideas into metaphors and heuristic techniques that enable students to process the discipline-specific advice they are already (hopefully) receiving from their supervisor/s. If supervisors are giving detailed feedback on thesis drafts, then these heuristic techniques can help students to make sense of details by understanding the general writing principles underpinning the feedback they receive.

Through recent collegial coffee conservations, we’ve devised a metaphor to help students grasp the fundamental notions of thesis form and thesis function. We offer it here, in the hope that it can be useful in our colleagues’ conversations with students.