Guidelines for doctoral peer review of writing

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Accurate word choice, authorial voice, Emotion & writing, feedback on writing, Feedback practices, Peer review

By Susan Carter

Doctoral peer review of each other’s writing is something that we discuss from time to time on this blog. We have covered  practical issues and Dr Pia Lappalainen, as she described a course for doctoral candidates hosted at the Aalto University in Finland, included an extensive list of steps to support peer review.

I have been prompted to review this list against two other writing group guides because, as I commenced 2023 with a doctoral writing group that mostly peer review, we reconsidered  reviewing guidelines in our first meeting.

In my experience it can be hard to get a peer review group that really bonds, with a strong trust factor, and the likelihood of feedback that is genuinely helpful in terms of the ability to improve writing, and also in terms of emotional support. So here I’m drawing on the two earlier posts, and introducing another one that has long-standing use at the University of Auckland, as a way of opening up some of the knotty issues in the practice of peer review.

Creative arts and industries: the practice-based arts voice

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authorial voice, English language writing skills, thesis writing, writing style

By Susan Carter with Fiona Lamont

Fiona Lamont is a Research Services Advisor at the University of Auckland. Her job entails assistance to researchers, and often these are doctoral writers.

Over the Covid 19 lockdown in New Zealand, Fiona and I (mostly Fiona) facilitated a digital workshop for students from the University of Auckland’s Creative Arts and Industry Faculty (CAI). That faculty spans disciplines where practice, performance or the production of artefacts make up the majority of the candidate’s original contribution. But candidates must also submit a dissertation or exegesis.

The need to write a doctoral dissertation when you are a skilled musician, artist, dancer, choreographer or architect means crossing semiotic systems, and that can be a frustration. To what extent could that dissertation itself map onto the creative work? Structure and voice in writing seem like the dimensions where the best fit between creative practice and text could be considered.

Voice in thesis writing – why does it continue to engage us?

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authorial voice, Researcher identity, Voice in thesis writing

Claire Aitchison

So much has been written about voice in research and thesis writing and yet it continues to be a perennial concern amongst bloggers, writing teachers and researchers. In a recent supervisory discussion, I was reminded again of just how contentious this issue can be.

Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash

What is voice?

Some people consider voice simply in terms of rhetorical and linguistic devices, but for me, it is SO much more.

I think of ‘voice’ as the sense of the author conveyed, intentionally or otherwise, through a host of interacting features including affect, tone, style, self-revelation and involving complex issues of identity, intent, and academic and disciplinary practice. In other words, I regard voice as a social practice of identity making. In this, I am heavily influenced by the work of Ros Ivanič (1998) who sees voice in relationship to an author’s struggles with authority, self-representation and personal history. For doctoral writers and their practices, these struggles are in direct relationship with questions of the ‘autobiographical self’ (the writer’s life-history, the motivations driving their research scholarship), the ‘self as author’ (i.e., the authorial self, the authority they bring to their writing) and the ‘discoursal self’ (a writer’s representation of self).  Some of this identity formation through writing is conscious and some unconscious, sometimes it is conflictual, and it is always contextual – influenced by the norms and practices of the discipline, the methodological approach, the topic itself, the impending examination, and perhaps even the preferences and predilections of the supervisor!

Writing an article – how is it different from writing a thesis?

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audience, authorial voice, literature review, thesis by publication, writing journal articles

by Cally Guerin

Some doctoral candidates come into their programs with extensive experience of writing for publication from their previous work or study. For most, though, it is a big jump from writing assignments for lecturers or a Masters dissertation to writing a formal article for publication in a high-ranking, peer-reviewed journal. There’s a lot of useful information out there about how to write for academic journals. In this post I want to focus on an aspect of this discussion that is rarely mentioned: how does article writing differ from thesis writing? Importantly, how can doctoral writers recognise and respond to the difference?

Balancing simplicity and complexity in doctoral writing

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authorial voice, bad academic writing, word choice

By Cally Guerin

Many years ago, I wrote a PhD thesis that used French psychoanalytic and postmodern theory. It may have been the translation of the texts, but I found it necessary to read, and re-read and re-read again before I even began to understand the concepts, let alone learn how to work with them. Part of my difficulty was the cultural preference in those texts for long, convoluted sentence structures; another part was the slow process of becoming familiar with a new vocabulary.

However, it took many years before I started to recognise that sometimes when I couldn’t understand a piece of writing, the problem lay in the writing rather than me.

There are plenty of jokes about how obscure academic writing can be. Many readers will be familiar with the Bad Writing Contest from the 1990s; or have read Steven Pinker’s diatribe on how and why academic writing stinks. As Pat Thomson points out, this kind of writing is an easy target. But you undoutedly know what these critics mean – those sentences with very long noun groups, filled with abstract nouns or ‘nominalisations’ and lots of punctuation.

So, given the poor reputation of academic writing, how should we best advise doctoral candidates to strike the right balance in their writing?

Authorial voice, or “Putting on the Ritz”

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authorial voice, avoiding plagiarism, originality in writing

This is a reposting of a blog from last year with a refreshed URL.

By Cally Guerin

Doctoral students are often told they ‘must find their own voice’ in their writing, and they must explain the literature ‘in their own words’. Even if the literature they are reading is beautifully expressed, they can’t just copy it: they must find another way of explaining the same ideas. But – and it’s a big but – they have to do this in a way that is recognisable to others in their discipline. Their work needs to match the expectations of their disciplinary community (for example, they need to demonstrate that they can use the ‘correct’ structures, the ‘correct’ citation conventions, the ‘correct’ vocabulary, the ‘correct’ genres and forms) (Eira 2005). Confusingly, they must ‘be original, but not too original’ (Picard & Guerin 2011).

I’m fascinated by the slippery concept of ‘voice’. It seems to me that everyone talks about it as if they know what it means, but if you start to ask them ‘So, how do I demonstrate my voice in writing?’, I’ve noticed some scholars start to look a little shifty and change the subject.