Pinterest for doctoral writing: Learning from creative writing

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Accurate word choice, Pinterest, visual communication

By Cally Guerin

Searching around for new ideas for my doctoral writing classes recently, I found myself perusing the endless array of pins on Pinterest. Academic writing, and especially doctoral writing, is often regarded as being almost entirely separate from creative writing: doctoral writing is supposed to be objective, direct, dry. However, a short foray into the world of Pinterest quickly reveals that much of the advice to novelists is relevant to doctoral writers, so I started compiling my own board of pins that were aimed at aspiring fiction writers but also useful for academic writing.

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Achieving writing precision: applying simple activities to complex thesis writing

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Accurate word choice, argumentation, English language writing skills, Precision

By Susan Carter

When…you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out in the open and has other people looking at it.                                   (A. A. Milne, 1961, p. 101)

In last week’s workshop with a group of doctoral students, we began by talking about what was puzzling, troubling or interesting people currently about their doctoral writing. A couple agreed that it was really hard to put ideas that are good in the mind onto a page–like Pooh Bear above, they found quite good thoughts somehow looked much less convincing in a draft of writing.

Some common disgruntlements emerged: feeling your own writing is boring to read and boring to write, and wondering whether the current writing might not end up in the thesis so feeling all that work might be a waste of time.

The potentiality of ideas seemed to be shut down when packaged into linear writing, in the same way that the pleasure of having inviting purchase options is gone once you spend your cash. You get one thing, and that is all.

A challenge those with English as an Additional Language agreed on, however, was how hard writing was at doctoral level, because ‘literacy’ suddenly became ‘much more complicated.’ So this week, we met again for a small exercise that comes from Linda Evans on developing precision in expression.

It begins asking students to take approximately three minutes to write down a good definition of a chair.

‘Insider persona’ in voice: practical suggestions for doctoral writers

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Accurate word choice, English language writing skills

By Susan Carter

We know that one outcome of the successful thesis is a fully-fledged researcher who has been accepted as an insider into their research community. How can doctoral students demonstrate through their writing that they are insiders? Berkenkotter and Huckin (1995) found that reviewers of 441 submitted conference abstracts had four criteria for acceptance or rejection. One was the sense that the author projected ‘an insider persona’.

Reviewers liked abstracts whose authors accurately portrayed relevant literature, used the right terminology but also sounded as though they would deliver a publishable paper. Thesis writers want that same sense in what they submit: a thesis should seem publishable, and is stronger when the writing has a confidence to it.

Here are some quite simple practical tips for gaining a sense of authority by writing more clearly.

Voice and emphasis in doctoral writing

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Accurate word choice, Precision, Writing as social identity; the reader as significant other

By Susan Carter

Here’s a speculation: too much writerly focus on discipline convention sometimes muffles the value of the argument and the authorial voice. I’m prompted by three separate experiences. Two were wrapped around giving feedback on writing.

Bert’s a longstanding personal friend who is also currently a doctoral student: we worked together decades ago before university became a part of our lives and were surprised to find each other both locked into academia. Because I know Bert well, I know that he is passionate about inclusive teaching, and I could see that his authentic concern with getting at-risk students safely through their first year at university would have been the foundation for his PhD topic. Yet he was struggling with writing, stuck, getting hammered a bit by his supervisors, and I became an informal mentor.

What I noticed straight way as I read his chapter draft was that he avoided making statements about his own belief: there was no sense of a live author with a set of pedagogical values evident in his discussion section. In Education, there needed to be, and even more so in this case. As a friend, I felt indignant that Bert’s commitment to what he saw as academic style (objective, muted in tone) was betraying who he was, the caring teacher–and one also, at this point in time, a caring teacher under pressure to wrap up his PhD.

Then another colleague who is in the early stages of her doctorate showed me two sections of her writing. One was written on the basis of an initial review of literature. The other was written on the basis of her own ideas. The ideas-prompted one was much more logical in its flow, more animated and convincing, with a stronger sense that she was an experienced trustworthy author.

Comparison made me wonder whether maybe it is sounder to begin from the spark of ideas and feed literature references into the prose than it is to privilege the literature as the starting point.

I suspect that most experienced academic writers follow this practice, and it may be a point of difference between experienced research writers and those who are new to the task, new to the extensive literature search and daunted by academic conventions. Of course, initially candidates need to read extensively to check there is a gap in knowledge to be filled, and to tentatively write about what they read, but once writing starts in earnest, I believe that prose driven by ideas is usually stronger.

When candidates step up to research writing at a higher level than they have experienced before, it can seem daunting trying to meet discipline conventions and reader expectations. But, certainly in some disciplines, a good legend above the desk might be ‘Trust yourself: Your research value lies more in your ability to think and connect than in your ability to hobble prose to academic conventions.’

There is also the issue of getting the balance of emphasis just right. The third thing prompting this post was an article in a recent Listener on good communication. It gave examples of workplace behaviour that would require people to initiate difficult conversations, and then compared three approaches to demonstrate good and bad practice.

Essentially, the speaker needed to broach a conflict of interests; the skilled initiator should aim to avoid an angry argument, and nor should they be so polite that they fail to state their concern effectively. In the Listener article, the children’s version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears provided the analogy for approaches that, like Goldilock’s experience of the three bears’ different beds, were too hard, too soft and just right. Some statements were too harsh, some were too gentle, so ineffective, and then there was the carefully worded just right version.

I think often doctoral writing manoeuvres through the same challenges with saying things exactly right for the amount of emphasis that will neither antagonise a reader because too strongly stated, nor be so hedged as to fail to make a contribution.

Sometimes writing is less clear when it strives to capture academic language, for example, when the passive voice is striven to be maintained, clarity may be lost–I’m spoofing the passive here to demonstrate. I’m not sure what to suggest in such cases, and wonder if others have practical ways of talking students through to where they find their own voice, and capture the right emphasis on their own ideas.

Peer review of writing: the mechanics of how

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Accurate word choice, feedback on writing, structuring argument, talking about writing, writing fun, Writing motivation, writing retreat

By Susan Carter

Doctoral peer review of writing seems like wise practice to me. It widens the source of feedback: if students have any dissatisfaction with the way their supervisors review their writing, quite simply, they can supplement that elsewhere. The groups I run are generic, with people bringing writing from any discipline. Groups can be really productive within departments or faculties, or can be, like mine, centrally situated.

Setting up a group recently where there was some initial uncertainty about how to give helpful feedback to colleagues, I set out some criteria. Since no one could think of more to add, we set out with this as guidance:

Watch out for emotions. You will get the most from the session if you are open to critical feedback, but try to gauge how much advice works best for you as an individual. Then as a reviewer take care according to the sensitivity climate. Humans have a tendency to be critical rather than praising: we are trained as researchers to do this. Remember that in this case reviewers must talk about what works well as well as giving constructive feedback for improvement: begin with what works well and why before moving into what could be improved. Ending on a reaffirmation is often recommended too.

Being concrete and specific about what has worked well is important: group talk about exactly what we like gives pointers to improving writing. It has benefits beyond the emotional boost for the writer.

Writers can ask for specific areas to be given thought:

• Is the structure ok?
• Are you convinced by the X section?
• Is the Y section clear?
• Do I need to explain more about Z?
• Is this just too simplistic?
• Is this too obscure and hard to read?
• Do I sound authoritative in my use of theory?
• Could you watch for grammar or punctuation problems?
• Please suggest better words for any of my phrases.

As a reader follow the writer’s direction. You could also look for other stylistic qualities.

• Are there any times when the tone slips, for example, when language becomes too informal, or too stilted, or too obscure, or too naive?
• Are there any disjunctive colloquialisms? Any dead clichés? Or any words that you suspect may be problematic (e.g., ‘naturally’ if you are in a constructivist framework where nothing is assumed to be natural)?
• Is the tension right? Could the prose be tightened: is it too loose with many sentences yielding little of real value? Or is it too tight and dense to be understandable?
• Is the level of definition and explanation right? Are there any points when you need more explanation? Or are there places where there is too much spelt out so that this detracts from the flow of ideas?
• Are there repeats at word level or in sentence structure that would be better avoided?
• Are there any sentences that are too long and complex? If so, suggest a way of splitting giant mutant sentences into more than one.
• Are there times when emphasis seems inaccurate?
• Could you add any suggestions at times when ideas seem promising but not fully developed?

In peer review practice, I suggest that while staying aware of the emotional dimension reviewers should offer any suggestions that they believe would be helpful. Whenever a sentence is hard to follow, they should indicate this, and offer a way of clarifying it. It is so helpful when reviewers suggest how to restructure more logically, or find a more precise word, or ask questions that drive the author to see what is missing. The author has the option of rejecting suggestions, but will get something of value: a truthful view of their own work through another reader’s eyes.

That was where my criteria ended. As the group met for review over several sessions, we learned more about the mechanics of peer review.

This semester, several participants commented that it is really helpful getting feedback from someone who is not in their discipline.

A light came on for me when a reviewer said ‘I don’t know how to review this; the topic is so far out of my understanding,’ the biophysicist author helpfully suggested, ‘if you replace this big term with A and this one with B and this one with C, would it make sense to you?’ She’d articulated what I have found for years: if you ignore the content, and follow reading for logical progression, structure and grammar, you can give a great deal of useful feedback to writers without actually understanding the content fully.

In many ways this sort of feedback from someone who doesn’t understand is as important as feedback from insiders who do: the outsider reader is then reading the mechanics of language without being distracted by engagement with the content. Clarity is likely to result from a diligent unknowing reader. Another participant noticed that she really liked what she called experiential comment: times when someone said ‘at this point, I wondered why…’ or ‘here I am feeling that…’ and gave a real sense of the reader and their needs as they move through the writing.

The impetus generated by reviewing writing together is huge. One of the huge benefits of peer review is that it literalises the reader, someone who can slip out of focus if you are writing alone from a writerly perspective. In a writing group, the reader gives formative rather than summative feedback. It’s friendly. There’s sometimes laughter. Yet a lot is achieved too.

Several people in the group had significant breakthroughs with how to structure their work by talking through the difficulty they were having with sympathetic listeners hoping to help. In that group now, some of our time allows for problem talk and feedback. I suspect that in each case it wasn’t so much the feedback that caused the threshold crossing moment, but the act of explaining what was hard led the writer to solve their own problem.

 

 

 

 

Saying ‘says’ in research writing

Tags

Accurate word choice, Precision

By Susan Carter

Academics tend to agree that, all else being equal, a simple word is better than a pedantic one. There’s one curious exception: we all know to avoid saying ‘says’ in academic writing.

Words that say ‘says’ without saying the actual four-letter word convey a complex signaling system. Careful choice of ‘says’ words shows critical evaluation of the literature—it is the literature that usually does the saying in research writing.

I once heard a doctoral student say that their supervisor told them to always use ‘suggests.’ The student believed it was a discipline preference relating to an objective voice–I think it was simply bad advice.

For all disciplines need to show critical analysis: ‘suggests’ is simply the wrong word in some cases. Maybe the supervisor didn’t trust this person to signal correctly in their choice of options and thought ‘suggests’ was a pretty safe default position. Yet, encouraging students to think about the degrees of difference in what those ‘says’ words convey is one way to explicitly show them how to achieve more accurate and nuanced academic writing.

‘Suggests,’ is neutral, a tad on the tentative side. A suggestion doesn’t stridently take a stance. So although ‘suggests’ seems harmless, it won’t be the most accurate word if the author actually was really emphatic. If an examiner wants sound evidence of critical interpretation, ‘suggests’ often won’t give that.

Gathering ‘says’ words into a list shows more clearly the nuances of meaning between them. ‘Says’ words can be collected up by individuals or as a group exercise. Then they can be put together for ones that might be used in similar situations. This includes, for example, when an author

• really is tentative or explorative;
• endorses someone else;
• disagrees with someone else;
• picks something apart to show better how it works;
• pulls things together in new ways; or
• takes things further.

I’ve drawn up a list of some of these words, and put them into clusters. At the shallow end of the pool: ‘explores,’ ‘speculates,’ ‘suggests,’ ‘proposes,’ ‘finds,’ and ‘shows.’

There are also ‘describes,’ ‘clarifies,’ explains’ or ‘unpacks’ for the times when authors make things clearer.

They may ‘theorise,’ ‘refine,’ or calibrate.’ With just a little more force, it might become ‘asserts,’ ‘endorses,’ ‘demonstrates,’ ‘affirms.

An author may ‘emphasise’ or they may actually ‘argue.’

When an author wants to say that those they are citing came across something really very new, the cited author can be said to ‘discover’ or ‘find’. And there are two uses of ‘finds:’ the literal one when something is actually found that was missing before; and the metaphorical one to mean when a position about previously know things has been found and taken by this individual thinker.

When an author makes headway by clearing aside misconceptions, they may ‘doubt,’ ‘refute,’ ‘rebuff,’ ‘challenge,’ ‘dispute,’ ‘disprove,’ or, more graphically, ‘explode the myth/misconception/belief.’

Or they may follow someone else’s lead but continue the vector further, as when they ‘add,’ ‘expand,’ ‘develop,’ or ‘take further.’ Sometimes they ‘synthesise’ by pulling different discourses together.

When a research writer says an author ‘reveals,’ ‘illuminates,’ ‘dissects,’ ‘explicates,’ ‘develops,’ or ‘anatomises,’ they are also saying that they found that work helpful, and learned from it. They are endorsing the author they are citing, and aligning their own work with it. My own favourite, my highest praise for a cited author, is ‘anatomise,’ because it conjures up the cutting open to show how things work inside. Rembrandt’s Dr Tulp with his solemn anatomy lesson springs to mind.

Any other ‘says’ words, or comments on this curious social phenomena?