• About
  • Blog
  • Doctoral Writing Discussions
  • Contact us

DoctoralWriting SIG

DoctoralWriting SIG

Category Archives: 3. Writing Practices

Critical pragmatics of doctoral writing: fluency, plagiarism, structuring, procrastination

21 Tuesday Mar 2023

Posted by doctoralwriting in 3. Writing Practices

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Doctoral writing, Emotion & writing, structuring argument, talking about writing, Writing as social identity; the reader as significant other

By Susan Carter and Cecile Badenhorst

Years of participating in and hosting doctoral writing workshops has led me to believe that, when time and care are given to the pedantry of academic writing, the benefits are significant.  When grammar and syntax are impeccable, writers avoid annoying examiners. That factor is quite important. But I think that carefully edited writing improves more substantially than a surface level tidy-up.

So, some workshops focus on such mundanities as grammar, syntax and punctuation while facilitators hope that the talk in their workshops will take writers further, into the deeper level of how language conveys quite critical significance. Cecile Badenhorst has provided the answer to the dilemma of what to call such workshops: they are critical pragmatic writing workshops (Englander, K. & Corcoran, J. 2019).

“Critical pragmatics” encapsulates an approach that many of us like. The  word pragmatic shows awareness that students want to succeed within the status quo no matter how inequitable or taxing it may be. Then the word critical encourages students to assess their options rather than just being socialized into the discourse. Continue reading →

Doctoral writing 2023: Where’s this year heading?

09 Thursday Feb 2023

Posted by doctoralwriting in 3. Writing Practices

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Desire to write, Emotion & writing, Researcher identity, Staying realistic with writing

By Susan Carter

Somehow we’re in February and what was a nice new year to be celebrated a few weeks ago has cranked up into taking itself seriously and we are back at work in the wilds of doctoral pedagogy.

For many of us, that means we are back thinking of different ways to support doctoral writing strongly, so that authors can both crack through obstacles to doing it—Paul Silvia is a help with this—and clearly see what examiners are looking for and how the weird genre of the doctoral thesis works.

Claire, Cally and I would like to begin this year with an invitation by asking readers who routinely provide writing workshops for doctoral writers to consider offering this blog a post in 2023.

Make that asking you, dear reader….If you facilitate writing workshops for undergraduates, for academics, or for creative writers and can see how your session design could be adapted, we’d welcome new approaches. If you have advice or exercises you have developed as a supervisor, you could also consider sharing them. And if you are a candidate with insights into doctoral writing that you think are both fairly novel and distinctly useful, here’s an opportunity to contribute to colleagues. You could email us here with a rough idea for a post to kick it off.

You might find stimulation for thinking about doctoral writing practices amongst the doctoral writing discussions that Juliet Lum and Susan Mowbray coordinate—these occur live, and then Juliet and Susan report on what was covered. Towards the end of 2022 topics including how to see writing as healing, and how supervisors and academic developers can work together to support doctoral writing. The discussions have the vitality of a community with shared interests yarning together, taking a topic from different points of view and sharing experiences. That ability to share interests, empathy and strategies makes this blog and these conversations worth continuing into this new year.

Moving along from an invitation to publish a post with us, I’d like to post a provocation prompted by the last few traumatic years of a pandemic with subsequent lockdown and climate extremes that have devastated some regions and disrupted lives. There’s some good empirical evidence of this (e.g., Byron, 2020; Bukko & Dhesi, 2021; Levine et al., 2021), besides the videos on the news.

So yes, this is a newish year, but many of us feel less secure than we might have done a few years ago. It seems unrealistic to ignore what is happening outside of academia when much is so intrusive as to affect what happens within it.

So what do you think about this: Should the academic community encourage doctoral writers to include mentioning any external trauma that has affected their research in the same way that they would if experiments failed, or data proved unexpectedly impossible to get? Are some external disruptions as legitimate an aspect of doctoral research as internal disruption? Is how doctoral researchers handled such disruptions a vital part of demonstrating their development into independent researcher professionalism? Does this relate to discipline, with HASS more likely than STEM to see the epistemological relevance of contextualising research within the experience of doing it?

I’d like to do more on this on this blog, and I am wondering if there’s a research project on the issue of writing about personal trauma affecting research experience. Could we start a discussion on how that writing could be framed, and where in the thesis it might go, so that academic integrity is maintained? Susan would be pleased if you sent her an email with your thoughts on writing in the thesis about the impact of the pandemic or climate change on research experience and then if there’s interest, she will assemble ideas into a post to follow this one.

Meanwhile, over the break Cally, Claire and I have been putting together another book, this one a guide to editing a journal special issue or a monograph with chapters from different authors. It’s for a great Routledge series edited by Pat Thomson and Helen Kara that is aimed at early career academics perhaps including doctoral candidates and especially new graduates seeking an academic career: Insider guides to success in academia. These are little books where authors with experience offer suggestions that they hope will be helpful for those taking on work they haven’t done before. You may find something of interest amongst them.

For us, it took us back into the sharp reality of academic writing: producing academic writing to a deadline, writing in a slightly different genre than usual, and doing this over the summer break. Admittedly, it’s been a stormy summer down here in the Southern Hemisphere, rather denying the idyll of sunshine, beach, outdoor walks, so urgency at the computer has seemed appropriate. But thinking about how to keep at writing for longer than is quite comfortable, how to savour what works well while staying alert to what needs more clarity, and how to write within the genre is now alive in our minds. Sometimes the gap between experienced academics and doctoral novices is not too huge.  

References

Byrom, N. (2020). COVID-19 and the research community: The challenges of lockdown for early-career researchers. eLife , no page numbers. https://elifesciences.org/articles/59634

Bukko, D. & Dhesi, J. (2021). Doctoral students living, leading and learning during a pandemic. Impacting Education: Journal on Transforming Professional Practice, 6(2), 25-33. 

Levine, F. J., Nasire, N.S., Rios-aguilar, C., Gildersleeve, R. E., Rosich, K. J., Bang, M., Bell, N.E., & Holsapple, M. A. (2021). Voices from the field: The impact of COVID-19 on early career scholars and doctoral students (Focus Group Study Report). American Educational Research Association: Spencer Foundation. https://doi.org/10.3102/aera20211

“I’ll show you mine if you show me yours”: Suggestions for developing writing confidence

28 Monday Nov 2022

Posted by doctoralwriting in 3. Writing Practices

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Sharing writing, Writing buddies, Writing confidence

By Sara Cotterall and Morena Botelho de Magalhães

Morena and I have worked in universities for a number of years. Amongst other things, we share a passion for languages and beer! Morena grew up in Brazil and I am from NZ. In 2014 we met at a conference in Bangkok and in 2016, we met at a conference in China, by which time we had become colleagues and friends. So, in 2017, when Morena was doing her PhD in Auckland and I had returned to New Zealand from teaching in the Middle East, we decided to present a conference paper together: “Doctoral research by EAL candidates: How effective is generic support?”. In 2019, with our friend Diego Mideros, we co-authored an article about identity, voice and agency in doctoral writing. So, having dined, researched, presented, travelled and written together, we thought it was time to blog together!

We believe that CONFIDENCE is essential for effective writing and wanted to share some strategies for building writing confidence. We planned the post together and have indicated who contributed what. We hope you find our suggestions helpful. [Sara]

Sharing writing, though often feared by novice writers, is beneficial [Morena]

Perhaps not all novice writers are afraid of sharing their work, but this was certainly my experience. Continue reading →

Doctoral writing development: supervisors and institutional support Part Two

07 Monday Nov 2022

Posted by doctoralwriting in 3. Writing Practices

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

Supervisors and writing experts, Third space practitioners, Writing support

By Claire Aitchison

In the previous blog post I explored how doctoral writing is supported through the work of supervisors and ‘third space’ practitioners, that is, those who operate from institutional units such as learning or writing centres, research offices or academic development units. In that post, I tried to tease out what might be different between centrally provided services and the work of a supervisor in relation to doctoral writing development. It’s a slippery space that challenges us to (re)consider our roles and practices.

Here I extend that discussion to consider how supervisors and third space practitioners can work together. Continue reading →

Doctoral writing development: supervisors and institutional support Part One

19 Wednesday Oct 2022

Posted by doctoralwriting in 3. Writing Practices

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Academic developers, Academic literacy advisors, Researcher developers, Supervisors as writing teachers, Writing Services

By Claire Aitchison

Many of our readers work with doctoral candidates in support roles either as researcher educators, academic literacy advisors, or academic developers, often in addition to being doctoral candidate supervisors. In this two-part blog, I draw on my own experiences, to explore the differences and interfaces between these roles, and what this means for the doctoral candidate.

I am thinking out loud – this is a work in progress designed to invite comment on my nascent reflections about the practices that mark our work with doctoral writing. Continue reading →

Writing Conference Abstracts

04 Tuesday Oct 2022

Posted by doctoralwriting in 3. Writing Practices

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Abstract, Conference abstracts

Claire Aitchison

For many researchers, presenting at a conference is the vehicle for the first ‘public’ display of their work. Whether you are supporting others with their conference abstract, or a student making your first draft – this post outlines key features for a successful abstract. Most of us are familiar with the abstracts of scholarly papers, however, while similar to the abstract that accompanies a journal paper, conference abstracts have some unique features.

Continue reading →

← Older posts

Enter your email address to follow this blog and receive notifications of new posts.

Join 18,508 other subscribers

Follow me on Twitter

My Tweets

Categories

  • 1. The Thesis/Dissertation
  • 2. Grammar/Voice/Style
  • 3. Writing Practices
  • 4. Publication
  • 5. Identity & Emotion
  • 6. Community Reports
  • All Posts

Events

  • British Educational Research Association Conference
  • EARLI (European Association for Research and Learning and Instruction)
  • HERDSA Conference (Higher Education Research and Development Society of Australasia)
  • Quality in Postgraduate Research (QPR) Conference
  • The Society for Research into Higher Education Conference

More people like us

  • AcWriMo (Academic Writing Month)
  • AILA Research Network on academic publishing
  • Association for Academic Language and Learning (AALL)
  • Consortium on Graduate Communication
  • Doctoral Teaching SIG
  • Explorations of Style: A Blog about Academic Writing
  • patter
  • PhD2Published
  • Research Whisperer
  • ThesisLink
  • Thesiswhisperer
  • Writing for Research
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Blog at WordPress.com.

Privacy & Cookies: This site uses cookies. By continuing to use this website, you agree to their use.
To find out more, including how to control cookies, see here: Cookie Policy
  • Follow Following
    • DoctoralWriting SIG
    • Join 2,779 other followers
    • Already have a WordPress.com account? Log in now.
    • DoctoralWriting SIG
    • Customize
    • Follow Following
    • Sign up
    • Log in
    • Report this content
    • View site in Reader
    • Manage subscriptions
    • Collapse this bar