Writing together with your doctoral student

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Feedback practices, writing skills development, Writing together with your student

By Claire Aitchison

You write, I correct, you fix and return

Mostly, supervisors expect doctoral students to write somewhere else, away from them, and then send the written work back so they can then give feedback. Typically, the next step involves the supervisor and student coming together to discuss the supervisor’s feedback. These discussions may involve the student asking for clarification, the supervisor elaborating on their critique, occasionally students and supervisor will debate the feedback and perhaps renegotiate what needs to be done next. And mostly meetings will end with a list of tasks for the student to take away and do—again, on their own—before returning to the cycle yet again. This practice requires the student to be able, and motivated, to get on with the writing between sessions.

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Writing conference presentations: think about the audience

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oral presentations, speaking at conferences

By Cally Guerin

I’ve been fortunate to attend several Higher Education conferences lately and have been thinking about the research writing in the papers I’ve listened to. There have been a broad range of presentation styles, giving me contact with norms outside my usual disciplinary connections. Most of the presentations have been fabulously stimulating, and it has been wonderful to spend time with people who are passionate about their research, socially engaged and working to make the world a better place. I have also been reminded of just how important it is to think about communicating with the live audience in the room.

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.

Writing as … metaphors for loving writing

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Metaphors for writing, writing fun

By Claire Aitchison

Doctoral scholars, their supervisors and academics in general, all have intimate relations with writing. It’s our everyday world. Like any intimate relationship, this liaison has its ups and downs: there are times of love and hate, joy and bitterness, times when we resent writing and other times when it brings us comfort and delight.  Who hasn’t known what it’s like to fight and wrangle with writing late at night, exhausted, and wishing to cut the ties and run away forever?!

In this post – at the end of Academic Writing Month (AcWriMo) – I use metaphors to explore some of my relationships with writing.

Writing as tranceWriting can put me into a trance-like state so that I am totally unaware of the rest of the world. When I am deep in writing I am in an altered frame of mind, detached from time and space. My physical presence is irrelevant – I don’t feel hunger, I don’t realise that I haven’t moved for hours on end. Whole days can go by unnoticed as I am completely absorbed, as if under a hypnotic spell. In these times, writing is the master and my attachment is singular, complete and involuntary. While I love Writing as trance I am not sure it is wholly healthy, certainly not for extended periods.

Writing as meditation

When writing is meditative, it is mindfulness in the extreme. Unlike Writing as trance this relationship is more intentional and controlled.

The Risky Business of Supporting Doctoral Writers

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play, risk and resistance, writing activities

Our guest bloggers this week are Nonia Williams and Zoë Jones, Learning Enhancement Tutors at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK. They share a passion for using a creative and innovative approach in their work. They offer one-to-one tutorials and workshops for students of all levels of study, including postgraduate researchers. Their workshops cover a range of topics: researching, planning, drafting and editing written work, referencing and other aspects of academic study. They also facilitate PhD writers’ retreats. Here they talk about the playful strategies they use in their workshops with doctoral writers.

by Nonia Williams and Zoë Jones

It can feel risky to encourage doctoral students to try innovative, creative and playful strategies to enhance their writing. Yet, in our tutorials and workshops this is exactly what we do, with activities such as yoga and meditation; playing with LEGO©; drawing and discussing pictures and shapes; inviting students to take a walk with us or each other (see Jones and Williams, 2018, for more information about the detail of these activities). But why do we consider such activities to be ‘risky’ – for our students as well as ourselves? And why might it be worth taking these risks?