Moving beyond ‘because I said so’ – motivation for thesis writing

Tags

completion of doctorate, Disciplining the writer, Emotions and academic writing, Writing motivation

Dr Kay Guccione (@kayguccione) works at the University of Sheffield. Kay designs mentoring programmes for researchers and her work is centred on linking people together to talk about the things that matter to them.

By Kay Guccione

Writing a thesis of 80,000 to 100,000 words is something we expect of everyone in almost all forms of doctorate. In a PhD it’s impossible to avoid doing some writing — our writing is what we are assessed on and how we communicate our research in conventional forms. With ‘publish or perish’ resonating down every corridor, our attitude to writing is our gateway to the currency of research careers. We are emotionally preoccupied with the fear, excitement, dread, satisfaction, guilt and elation of writing (Wellington, 2010) — see #AcWri #AcWriMo #shouldbewriting #shutupandwrite…

But for some, writing in thesis form seems a futile endeavour at first glance.

Reading and writing the thesis acknowledgement – support, people and identity

Tags

doctoral support, Thesis acknowledgements, writing the Acknowledgements

by Lilia Mantai

This fabulous guest post about thesis acknowledgements comes from Lilia Mantai who settled in Australia after completing her teaching degree in Germany. For the last six years she has been working at Macquarie University, Sydney, in various roles (as tutor, research assistant, project officer and academic developer). She is now close to submitting her PhD on researcher identity development of doctoral students. Good luck Lilia!

Writing is personal. It is also social as it does not happen in isolation. Discussing and clarifying ideas with your colleagues, receiving and incorporating feedback from critical friends and reviewers are social acts that make writing collaborative. Yet the doctoral thesis comes across as a disembodied, de-personified and de-personalised product of doctoral ‘training’ – void of the emotions, typical PhD ups and downs, and identity crisis battled in the process. Until you read the thesis acknowledgements.

My PhD research looks at how doctoral students become researchers in the PhD journey.

While reading through various theses in the early stages of my PhD, it struck me that the acknowledgement section of the thesis was just oozing with personal and ‘behind-the-scenes’ stories.

Doctoral writing and feedback: Moving on from negative emotion

Tags

Emotion & writing, feedback on writing, supervisor feedback

By Susan Carter

I’ve just had the amazing experience of getting to know Professor Rowena Murray from the University of the West of Scotland. We spent a pleasant few hours weeding a graveled area around a church hall with the community gardeners in the village of Lochwinnoch.

Talking about our research topics while weeding was a great way for one thought to lead to another, almost like the bramble rhizomes we were pulling out. I’ve walked a supervision meeting, but suspect that there might be other physical activities that both student and supervisor enjoy doing that would allow for the same organic thinking together process.

Weeding allowed time to talk about academic writing and doctoral students.

This post covers one topic that we sifted through and agreed upon: the potential for emotional disturbance in relationship to writing and feedback (see to Sara Cotterall’s earlier post and my own on emotion.) Then we also thought about how students might learn to manage their emotions, and resolve differences between themselves and their supervisors—and then be aware of their own personal development from handling something well recognized as challenging.

Olympic endurance and doctoral writing: on motivation

Tags

Emotion & writing, talking about writing

By Susan Carter

What I have loved about watching Olympic events on TV is the athletes’ demonstration of determination, self-possession and focus. At the same time, I have been reading a couple of books that deal with writer’s block, bringing the intensity of emotion around writing to the fore. The books are Alice Weaver Flaherty’s (2015) The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain and Peter Elbow’s (1998) Writing without Teachers. This post was prompted by a combination of the Olympic games backdrop to my current reading about writing. Both things are inspiring. They converge.

I keep seeing connections between Olympic effort and doctoral writing. OK, so those writing PhDs are not striving to be the best in the world, but they are labouring to become a world expert in their niche. Over the course of a PhD you need to acquire some of those strengths that world athletes take to the limit.

And the limbic system seems to have a lot to do with this.

A life in review: Writing tasks that academics do that we don’t talk about

Tags

Academic reviewing, Peer review

This guest post is from Sue Starfield, professor in the School of Education and the Director of the Learning Centre at UNSW Australia. Sue’s interests include tertiary academic literacies, doctoral writing, writing for publication and identity in academic writing. If you enjoy this, you may like these related posts.

It struck me recently that I spend large amounts of my everyday academic life carrying out reviews of various sorts. Besides the ongoing feedback I provide to my doctoral students on their writing, usually through ‘track changes’, I do many other kinds of reviews. Quite a number of these are quite high stakes such as examining a doctoral thesis or reviewing a book proposal for a publisher for example. Yet it is difficult, if not impossible, to gain access to exemplars of these kinds of texts.

Hyland and Diani (2009, p. 1) noted that “what academics mainly do is evaluate”. As Langveldt and Kyvik (2011, p. 199) point out in their examination of the multiple roles researchers play as evaluators in the course of their academic lives, these roles often have a gatekeeping function as researchers “provide or deny access to opportunities for fellow colleagues to do research, to publish research, and to get tenure or promotion”. But if these review/evaluation genres are not publicly available, how then do doctoral students as early career academics learn to write them?

Is dropping out failure? Je ne regrette rien

Tags

Doctoral student support, motivation, Should I drop out of the PhD?

By Claire Aitchison

In a world of spiralling credentialism where employers require ever higher qualifications, and institutions compete to recruit and keep doctoral candidates, it’s easy to see how students and supervisors can feel pressured to keep students enrolled. But what if you decide that doctoral study isn’t for you?

Recently I met up with a former student and in conversation she reminisced about her time as a doctoral student. Despite the many challenges she had experienced, she said how much she had enjoyed herself, especially the intellectual stimulation and sense of purpose she had as a doctoral scholar. She told me how she still loved her topic and wished she could have completed. I understood all of that – but then she went on to say she deeply regretted dropping out of her PhD.

This took me by surprise, because, all those years ago, when she contacted me about withdrawing she was so definite and had already made the necessary arrangements with the Grad School.