Doctoral writing: to think ideas or to sell them to the reader?

Tags

Accurate word choice, English language writing skills, Precision, thesis editing, Writing as social identity; the reader as significant other, writing skills development

by Susan Carter

This morning a colleague who was to provide a workshop for doctoral students phoned in sick. Stepping in at short notice to replace her, I’m used Amanda Wolf’s four sentence formula for writing a research proposal in the workshop.  As we worked through Amanda’s exercise, I noticed how this great post is an exercise about writing to sell ideas to the reader rather than an exercise in writing to think. In this blog I ponder two related aspects arising from my fill-in workshop using Amanda’s sentence formula.

Doctoral writing: Exercises for stylish writing

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

By Susan Carter

To what extent should those of us who support doctoral writing aim to help candidates to write succinctly, clearly and with a control that makes reading smooth and even pleasurable? I puzzle over that, aware of what a marathon writing task the thesis presents, how emotionally challenging doctoral writing can be, how life can throw study off-centre and what an extraordinary amount of diligence has often gone into learning English as an additional language to the level of fluency and sophistication required at doctoral level. Might it demoralize doctoral writers to include tips about further authorial skill with feedback on content, structure, and ideas?

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.

Achieving writing precision: applying simple activities to complex thesis writing

Tags

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

Tags

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

Tags

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.