Doctoral writing across disciplines: style and voice in the borderlands

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identity and doctoral writing, Writing across disciplines, Writing for publication, writing skills development

By Susan Carter

I’m returning to a theme that intrigued me back when, as a doctoral learning advisor, I worked across disciplines with doctoral students who consulted me with their problems (Carter, 2011). Candidates sometimes wanted to talk about problems that surfaced specifically in the borderlands of doctoral interdisciplinarity. Back then, research interdisciplinarity was recognised as valuable but in my experience as a doctoral learning advisor, there was never a cohort of peers to ask for advice and mutual support.

Now, post-Covid, and in the face of evident climate change, it seems that solutions to tough global challenges might be best found by working across disciplines and we need to establish support for interdisciplinary doctoral research. And yet my hunch is that, in the tradition-hugging entrenched disciplinary norms and biases of academia, candidates could run into the same problems. Here’s my practice-based list of what can be tough.

Crafting your personalised soundscape for writing

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Good writing practice, Writing habits and strategies

By Dr Kay Guccione, a Senior Lecturer in Academic Development at Glasgow Caledonian University. Kay has been a teacher and educational development professional since 2010, working in Researcher and Academic Development at the University of Sheffield for nine years. Her specialism is in Dialogic Learning, as applied to Mentoring, Personal Tutoring and PhD Supervision. She was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship in 2018 in recognition of her national profile in these areas, and she edits a blog on Research Supervision, and edits the Journal of Imaginary Research

Selfie by Kay Guccione wearing her ‘obnoxious headphones’

Researchers in music psychology (of which I am not one, to be transparent) have produced a huge body of evidence, documenting how music affects human behaviour and emotion within a wide range of performance contexts, varying music genera and tempo, task type, volume and the presence or absence of vocals. Writing to the right musical soundscape, can make you work faster (Bramwell-Dicks et al, 2016). This post will put you in touch with resources for choosing music to write by.

Document naming conventions to avoid confusion between candidates and supervisors

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document management systems, exchanging texts for feedback

Claire Aitchison

In my experience academic writers often create fairly idiosyncratic systems for naming and sharing word documents. However, when authors need to collaborate, share, and review documents together, these individual systems can collide causing mix-ups and frustrations.

Getting into the swing: getting writing again in 2021

Claire Aitchison

Are you one of those people who run full hurtle into the sea, diving under in one fell swoop? Or do you prefer to creep in, slowly acclimatising the body as you inch yourself into the cool water?

Taking a break from the PhD can be invaluable for both students and supervisors. But getting back into the swing of things doesn’t always come easily.

Efficiency hacks for doctoral writers

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conclusions, efficient writing, figures and tables

by Cally Guerin

AcWriMo (Academic Writing Month) is finished again for another year, and the concerted effort all around the academic world to focus on writing for one month has paid off for many researchers and doctoral writers. Conversations with my local AcWriMo group have reminded me how some doctoral candidates have really great ways of pushing their writing along step by step throughout their projects (what Rowena Murray calls ‘serial writing’ in How to Write a Thesis). It seems to me that the concept of ‘writing up’ at the end of the project is a very good way to make writing both stressful and boring. Not many people can sit at the computer and write effectively and productively for 8-12 hours a day, day in, day out! Instead, here are some ideas to help doctoral writers be more efficient in their writing.

Developing doctoral students’ critical writing skills through peer assessment and review

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Critical thinking, part-time study, Peer review, student journal

Our guest blogger this week is Dr Joan Woodhouse, Associate Professor of Education at the University of Leicester UK. She has been working with doctoral students for approximately thirteen years and has a keen interest in developing early career researchers’ academic writing skills. Her other research interests include teachers’ lives and careers, and in particular, women teachers’ lives and career experiences. She is currently engaged in collaborative research into the experiences of student teachers who are mothers, with a view to considering how providers of Initial Teacher Education might better support this group of women, who she sees as the ‘invisible statistic’ in the equality monitoring data.

By Joan Woodhouse

As Programme Director for the Doctorate of Education (EdD), I have worked with numerous full-time teachers and school leaders who combine their professional work with part-time study. The EdD students are typically mid- to late-career teachers, often occupying fairly senior positions in school. As doctoral students they can be rather isolated from other, often younger, full-time and campus-based postgraduates. Their main point of contact with the University is with their supervisor. So, it can be, at best, challenging for this group of students to feel a sense of belonging to the academic and research community. Many of the EdD students are also returning to academic study after a significant gap and can feel uncertain in navigating the unwritten rules and culture of academia. They are expected to read and write critically, often without any explicit guidance on what that means. They are given feedback on their work in which the weaknesses in their arguments are highlighted, their poor expression exposed and the gaps in their knowledge indicated. It can be hard to take the critical feedback: affective barriers can impede students’ ability to assimilate and act on the feedback, yet assimilation and action are vital if they are to progress. Learning to respond to feedback in ways that are pragmatic rather than emotional is a big part of developing resilience as a researcher. I have come to realise that as supervisors and tutors we need strategies to foster this resilience in our students if they are to become the critical thinkers, readers and writers we need them to be to succeed at doctoral level.

This post is about a project in which a colleague and I inducted doctoral students into peer review by (i) involving them in peer assessment activities and (ii) supporting them to set up and run a student journal. Our aim was to facilitate the development of students’ critical writing skills, by engaging them in giving and receiving critical feedback (both of which they were fairly anxious about at the start).