Reflective research journals and doctoral writing

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Journaling and the PhD, reflective practice, research journal

Our guest blogger this week is Dr Amanda Lee. Amanda is a senior lecturer in Business & Management at the University of Derby, with a professional and academic background in Human Resource Management. Her research encompasses individual and organisational effects of remote working practices, managerial control and surveillance, the changing nature of professional and academic identity, ethnography and qualitative research methodologies. Find out more about her research here. She is Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy and Chartered Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Personnel & Development.

By Amanda Lee

PhD candidates are frequently encouraged by supervisors and researcher developers to maintain a journal during their studies. For doctoral writers, this can feel like an imposition on their time and effort, especially if that writing is unlikely to be used for the thesis itself. In this post, I’d like to explain how and why this process is so valuable, so that you’ll have some evidence to put to sceptical PhD writers.

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.