Wrapping up 2022

Tags

celebrating Doctoral Writing, writing through crisis

Again we have the pleasure of wrapping up another calendar year of the Doctoral Writing blog. As always, we note how quickly the year has passed – and 2022 is no exception.

Adelaide Bus Stop painting Artist Unknown

This year Covid continued to dominate our lives despite the desire of our governments to ignore it, and, increasingly, we have seen the impacts of global warming on our everyday routines. In Australia, like elsewhere, weather events have caused great upheaval – following massive fires in previous years, in 2022 we’ve experienced devastating floods.

Doctoral Writing 10th Anniversary!

Tags

Doctoral writing, Writing as social identity; the reader as significant other, writing skills development

By Cally Guerin, Claire Aitchison and Susan Carter

We are delighted (and somewhat amazed) that we’ve arrived at the 10^th anniversary of the Doctoral Writing blog. The world seemed such a different place when we put up our first post in September 7^th 2012! 

Photo by Anna-Louise

The three of us were still relatively new as colleagues back then; however, we shared a vision for a platform to foreground our collective interest in doctoral writing.

Postgraduate Supervision Conference, Stellenbosch, March 16-18, 2022

Tags

postgraduate supervision, trajectories, transformations, transitions, University of Stellenbosch

By Cally Guerin

The 8th Postgraduate Supervision Conference (PGS) was run fully online for the first time in March this year. It’s the first full conference I’ve attended since the pandemic began and it was such a joy to be in the ‘presence’ of other people researching doctoral education – I didn’t realise quite how much I’ve been missing this company! The program had lots of familiar names and faces, as well as many researchers whose work is new to me.

The Stellenbosch conference draws participants from across the globe and facilitates discussions that focus on some of the big issues facing doctoral education at present.

Another year and do we understand doctoral writing any better?

Tags

End-of-year greetings, feedback on writing, online writing group, Supervising online, Writing tips

 

For many of us in English speaking countries, the end of the year means heading into seasonal holidays when we gather together with family and friends, share meals, drinks, Christmas pies and side-step the pressure of work. Lockdowns and anxiety might have both limited this activity and made it even more emotional when there are chances to get together and celebrate just that—time spent together.

Photo by Askar Abayev from Pexels

This year we’re issuing a challenge: what have you learned this year about doctoral writing? The pandemic has forced us to learn new tricks, mostly with working at a distance to support doctoral writing, a topic that Cally considered last year. We thought we’d end 2021 by reflecting on what we’ve learned.

An A to W of Academic Literacy: Book Review

Tags

academic literacies, book review, research literacies, research terms

By Cally Guerin

Mary Jane Curry, Fangzhi He, Weijia Li, Ting Zhang, Yanhong Zuo, Mahmoud Altalouli & Jihan Ayesh (2021) An A to W of Academic Literacy: Key Concepts and Practices for Graduate Students. University of Michigan Press.

This book is jointly written by the eminent academic literacy scholar, Mary Jane Curry, along with a group of graduate students at Rochester University in the USA. Curry is well known for her work that engages directly with the politics and implications of globalisation in which “standard English” (or “Englishes”) has become the common language of academic scholarship. I was keen to see how these authors together explored core concepts of academic literacy that are important to post/graduate writers. Arguably, the co-authorship of this book with international students performs Curry’s position on academic literacy. And the book does satisfyingly deliver significantly more than a standard dictionary of terms or advice to novices. The information offered is not so much about “correctness” as a guide to navigating the contested, shifting terrain of research writing.

Strategies for Writing a Thesis by Publication: Book Review

Tags

book review, thesis by publication

By Cally Guerin

Book Review: Lynn P. Nygaard & Kristin Solli (2021) Strategies for writing a thesis by publication in the social sciences and humanities. Insider Guides to Success in Academia Series. Routledge.

I was delighted to come across Lynn Nygaard and Kristin Solli’s Strategies for writing a thesis by publication in the social sciences and humanities; sensible advice on this topic from such well-informed scholars is welcome and timely. This book is the first one I’ve read in the series edited by Helen Kara and Pat Thomson and it makes me keen to see other publications in the series.

The primary audience for Nygaard and Solli’s work is doctoral candidates, but it is very useful for supervisors, writing teachers and researcher developers. It takes a straight forward, practical approach to the thesis by publication, outlining the challenges and offering implementable strategies to produce a document suitable for examination. The text is up to date with current thinking, cites extensively from recent literature and is clearly in tune with the discussions occurring at institutions around the world and in a broad range of disciplines.