DoctoralWriting: a resource for practice

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Doctoral Writing Resources, research writing

From Claire Aitchison, Susan Carter and Cally Guerin

After 11 years of working together on this wonderful blog about doctoral writing we realise that the time is right to reimagine our roles and the operation of the site. From June 2023 the DoctoralWriting blog will move from being a place of regular blog-posting to become a repository of resources. This means we will cease putting up new posts; however, the Doctoral Writing Discussions hosted from this site will continue, as will the rich array of resources we invite you to mine.

We have just under 400 blogs on all things to do with doctoral writing – and these live on here available as a public resource for researcher educators, doctoral supervisors, and research candidates to access. While the DoctoralWriting blog chronicles our own personal and professional relationships with research writing and doctoral writing, it has also become a library of critical reflections on what writing is, and how it is done, within the context of doctoral studies. The posts include our own writing plus contributions from many guest authors featuring well-known scholars, as well as local practitioners and doctoral students. All our blogs are a mixture of sage practical advice and actionable reflections on writing scholarship and practice.

Those who host workshops for doctoral writers will find great teaching suggestions; doctoral writers themselves can find inspiration and sensible advice; and supervisors can use and direct students to these posts.

Accessing the resources

There are two ways to search for particular topics or simply to browse the resources:

1. Use the search function on the top right-hand side of the blog,
2. Use the ‘Categories’ headers on the right-hand menu to pull up blogs themed under these headings:
   • The Thesis/Dissertation
   • Grammar/Voice/Style
   • Writing Practices
   • Publication
   • Identity & Emotion
   • Community Reports

In addition, in 2020 we curated our blogs into a book, Doctoral Writing: Practices, Processes and Pleasures. Please ask your library to hold a copy or access it yourself.

Doctoral Writing communities

While we will no longer be posting blogs on this site, we do encourage you to continue to engage with the active community of scholars led by Drs Juliet Lum and Susan Mowbray who will continue to host regular live conversations about doctoral writing.

If you would like to join this community please contact Juliet or Susan.

Sincere thanks and sad goodbyes

We thank our many guest contributors who have brought new perspectives and audiences over many years, helping us build this remarkable library on doctoral writing.  We also thank those who have commented on posts, making this more visibly a community of interest. Thank you, too, to those who used our resources, followed us, and shared this blog with colleagues. We will miss engaging with you. And, on a personal note, we’ll miss working together as editors and authors on this landmark site.  It has been a labour of love that will be sorely missed.

Please continue to make use of the posts here. Should you wish to be in touch with any of us, please do so as indicated in the ‘About’ section.

Reference

Carter, S., Aitchison, C. & Guerin, C. (2020). Doctoral Writing: Practices, Processes and Pleasures. Springer Nature.

Doctoral Writing 10th Anniversary!

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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.

Editing multi-authored academic publications: sharing experiences

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community building, editing, multi-authored volume, professional skills

Many doctoral writers publish their research as articles in special issues of journals, as chapters in book collections of essays, or as contributions to academic blogs. In this post we explore a little of the background work by editors that goes into producing those publications. Understanding the editor’s perspective can provide valuable insights into research writing. For editors, these projects can be satisfying, complex, frustrating, enriching and everything in between.

Discussion chapters: writing feedback and revision

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Doctoral writing feedback, Revision before doctoral submission

By Judy Parr and Susan Carter

Judy Parr is a Professor of Education in the School of Curriculum and Pedagogy at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Highly effective, much esteemed, and generous with her time, Judy has been a mentor and model for Susan who is delighted to bring a combined post to you.

This post assembles some general advice for the writing, feedback and revision of a doctoral Discussion chapter. It’s a very important part of the thesis that needs to conceptualise and position what has been done in the doctoral study within the wider discourse.

This post has been prompted, as is often the case with DoctoralWriting posts, by practice: recently, we have been giving feedback on Discussion chapters both together and separately (and we acknowledge others we supervise with – we draw from their tips and strategies too).

Research conceptualization in doctoral writing Part Two

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Conceptualising your research

We hope you enjoy Part 2 of this post from Cecile Badenhorst, Professor in the Adult Education/Post-Secondary program in the Faculty of Education at Memorial University, Canada. Cecile explains her approach to teaching postgraduates about research conceptualisation and how this can be woven into the writing.

How can we teach research conceptualization as a process as well as a written product?

In Part 1, we looked at the link between research conceptualization and writing.  In this post, we will focus on a technique to help students conceptualize their research which will then help them write. The research conceptualization technique that I have used in classroom practice with research students is well-known qualitative researcher Sharan Merriam’s (2009) Problem Purpose Statement and Questions (PPS&Q).  Feedback from students indicates that this technique is helpful in guiding them through the beginning stages of their research, as well as the later stages of keeping focused and on track conceptually. The PPS&Q provides scaffolding for making decisions as one sorts out the complexities of setting up a research project. It has specific components and there is an element of alignment where all the components are arranged and placed with coherence and logic.

Research conceptualization in doctoral writing

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Conceptualizing the research project, Research conceptualization

We finish the year with a two-part post from Cecile Badenhorst who is a Professor in the Adult Education/Post-Secondary program in the Faculty of Education at Memorial University, Canada. Her research interests are post-secondary, higher education and adult learning experiences, particularly graduate research writing, academic literacies and qualitative research methodologies. She explains her approach to teaching postgraduates about research conceptualization and how this can be woven into the writing.

Research conceptualization is the process of transforming ideas into an operationalizable research project. This involves delimiting the research, identifying and developing core concepts and establishing a research design and agenda. Research conceptualization is often not viewed as a central part of the writing process and yet without a coherent framing of their research project, countless students find themselves stuck in their writing.  It’s important to realise that research conceptualization is usually part of the messy pre-writing thinking, conducted before writing happens, but explaining and justifying it is also very much part of the written documents students are expected to produce.

At the start of a research project, students are involved in the complex task of decision-making around delineating the research project.  Research is usually activated in response to a problem and these puzzles, challenges and dilemmas create the need and rationale for doing the research.  For many research students, constructing and communicating the research problem presents an immense hurdle and is often the most difficult part of the process (Ellis & Levy, 2008).  It is challenging for several reasons.