Doctoral writing: Why bother?

Tags

Desire to write, Emotion & writing, Staying realistic with writing

By Susan Carter

Recently a colleague posed this question to academics: ‘your research and publication–why bother?’ Now that sounds sullen and disenchanted, but it is a great question for drawing out what really matters about research. This post considers why we bother doing doctoral writing as students and carefully supporting it as academics.

It’s based on a workshop for doctoral candidates with a twofold purpose. The first was about emotion, to vent about the tribulations of doctoral writing for catharsis (and bonding, according to Mewburn, 2011) and then turn to listing positive reasons for doing this work as a motivational exercise. The other is to emphasise that throughout the thesis the reasons why the research matters should be overtly stated in writing, specifically in the introduction and the conclusion.

In a two hour workshop with doctoral students from several disciplines we first worked through the disenchantment inherent in ‘oh, why bother?’, making space for shared griping about what is bothersome about doctoral research and writing. People talked about what seemed hard to them at the time.

Then candidates moved to individually answer that question. The answers to ‘why bother?’ had to be accurate, not exaggerated or understated. There was a tendency for understatement, which is common, given that often it seems socially inept to tell people how important your own work is, and that allowed us to talk about the way that defending the doctorate required stating its significance. Group peer review ensured perfect iteration so that the right wording for inclusion in the thesis was sharp and persuasive.

My own belief is that we are hugely privileged to spend time on a research project and acquiring the advanced literacy skills that enable communicating what it means to others who are likely to be interested. I think of the very bright people I know trapped in boring jobs, perhaps with family responsibilities that mean they haven’t got the possibility to do a doctorate. I know many doctoral students have similar pressures in their lives, but somehow within their own resources they find a way to keep their career moving forward and their minds keen as they learn. Not everyone can.

Here is a list of reminders about what doctoral writing can do for you:

• Finding an academic voice helps define who you are and what matters to you; it is an act of self creation;
• Gaining a sophisticated level of literacy that will be useful in the future;
• Finally figuring rules about grammar and even appreciating their logic;
• Writing passages that are really satisfying in their clarity and cleanness;
• Realising that writing is often flowing more easily;
• Joining a distinct discourse community;
• Gaining an ability to mentor others;
• Widening future career opportunities; and
• Becoming a stronger person who can manage their own emotions and the large writing project.

Many doctoral students are the first in their family to venture so far into education, and as they write, they write possible further success for future generations into their family’s history and repertoire. For some, passion about making the world a better place drives them as doctoral writers; they may be tackling big challenges or smaller ones, but know that they join the legions of humans who work in different ways to make things better.

This blog often acknowledges the challenges of doctoral writing, the way that feedback can be demoralising, that outside pressures can really squeeze, and that the pedantry and perfectionism of academic writing can baffle and irritate. We comment on these kinds of things because we know they can be bothersome. ‘Why bother?’ may often rise out of irritation, or self-doubt or self-pity from doctoral students or the academics who support their writing.

I’d like to gently suggest that most routes through life are harder than doing a doctorate, harder because they are more limited, smaller, and less full of potential. But it can be productive to take a moment to take this question to heart and to formulate a response that reminds one of the joys and benefits of the challenge. It is good to take ‘why bother’ literally, too, and articulate in the thesis so that there is no doubt that the project was worth doing, worth a doctorate, and that the original contribution is significant.

In the introduction and conclusion of the doctorate students could be encouraged to answer further questions with careful detail.

• Why did you take up this research?
• What was the problem that motivated you to seek a solution, or partial solution?
• Who were hurt by that problem?
• What was hard for you in this research project and what gave you the impetus to keep going?
• How does your research mitigate the problem or fill in a gap in knowledge or understanding?
• Who will benefit from your research findings?
• Might benefits be wider, in that your methods would work with other problems, or for practitioners in other disciplines?
• What gaps in knowledge or understanding still exist?

Supervisors probably need a different set of prompts, but might remember that whenever we work supportively with someone else’s writing, we learn more about what works and what doesn’t, and how we can mentor as part of making the world a better place through research and its writing. I’m always at risk of arriving at a happy ending, and am doing it again here, but would ask for contributions to share ways that we can help each other to know why we bother, and that it does matter. What is your response to ‘doctoral writing; why bother’?

Mewburn, I. (2011). Troubling talk: Assembling the PhD candidate. Studies in Continuing Education. Available at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0158037X.2011.585151?src=recsys

 

 

 

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Developing doctoral writing in four dimensions: Helen Sword’s baseline

Tags

Desire to write, Doctoral writing, Emotion & writing, Researcher identity, Writing as social identity; the reader as significant other

By Susan Carter

This post is premised squarely on the base line of Helen Sword’s latest book on academic writing. She begins by asking the reader to self-audit their own strengths and weaknesses as writers. This task orients them into the book, one rich with data from interviews with successful academic writers as to how they work. Sword has recommendations for each of the dimensions in this exercise. Yet she begins not with good advice, but with an affective approach, reaching into the core of each reader by asking us to reflect on who we are as writers. To self-analyse, we are given an exercise evaluating the different aspects of academic writing that influence development.

International students, community of practice, doctoral writing

Tags

Desire to write

By Susan Carter
I’m processing the ideas I heard at a one hour seminar on how academics can better support international students here in New Zealand, and considering how comments from it are relevant to doctoral writing. Ten international postgraduate students attended, along with about as many academics.
Two questions governed talk:
• What are the main challenges to international postgrads?
• What could academics do better to support them?
The academics were invited to speak first by the chair (along the lines of seeing whether they had it right according to the students), and quickly identified financial, cultural and language challenges as the main challenges.

Those are broad terms that the talk nuanced more carefully: cultural challenges included different learning cultures, how hard kiwi jargon is to understand and how hard it was not to shake off a sense of alienation. Our own culture is always invisible to us, so it is easy to see cultural difference as appending to the international rather than ourselves. The issue of a sense of alienation tallies with Sara Cotterall’s findings that the departmental ‘community of practice’ in practice is often less cosy, perhaps invisible, for international students (2014). It’s hard when you are an insider to see how discomforting a group is to an outsider. We need to be more consciously aware.

One academic commented that international students are much better at time management than local students—meeting deadlines and finishing within time seems not to be a challenge, despite all that writing in an additional language. At the statistics for completion at both the University of Auckland and the University of Adelaide confirm this—we suspect that it is generally true. However, a student made the point that although academics feel relaxed with international student progress, it has a serious down-side.

International students, she said, complete well because they are very task-focused and culturally programmed to meet deadlines. (And maybe they feel a little less comfortably at home in some social situations that are fun for locals.) Domestic students spend more time with social activities that slow them down. But when it comes to finding jobs after graduation, domestic students have the advantage. After more fun socialising, they have better networks, and networks of live relationships are often what leads a student into employment.

So international students are driven by fiscal reasons to finish fast, and perhaps also come from learning experiences that were more rigorous than those of most of our local students, and this is terrific in terms of impressive output. But academics need also to be teaching doctoral students how to be independent academics and researchers, and this, ironically, includes learning how to work interdependently. That is possibly something where any cultural mismatch between local and internationals students gives locals a significant advantage.

Could this need for networks be factored into doctoral writing, so that writing and writing feedback exchange amongst peers is done more collegially? If academics aim to foster a postgraduate community of practice, maybe they could be a little more emphatic about establishing that doctoral writing is best done with collegial support through regular seminars and peer review of doctoral writing. Claire Aitchison’s inspiring recent post offers a bundle of great suggestions for making writing social.

Somehow, a culture needs to be established that genuinely includes international students. Academics need to find ways to make talk and writing feedback homely for international students. There are many ways to do this, including drawing on volunteers from outside of the university. If you can create places that are less pressured than the supervisory meeting where writing feedback can be given, there are benefits at so many levels. It is not just about English grammar: it is more to do with making community and showing the benefits of professional interdependency. As they talk about writing, and write together, international students will also be developing those relationship-building skills in English language.

I’ve felt that the impressive completion rates of international doctoral students raises questions about why those with English as a first language are somehow unable to quite keep up. Why can’t locals do it too, at home, in their own language, and surrounded by family and friends? Now I am seeing this phenomenon differently. It throws more importance, I think, on all those collegial writing practices that Claire summarises as a way of making it more likely all students will build networks at the same time as they write a thesis.

Cited works

Carter, S. (2009). Volunteer support of English as an Additional Language (EAL) doctoral students. International Journal of Doctoral Studies Vol 4, 13-25.
Cotterall, S. (2014). The mythical community of practice. In Carter, S. and Laurs, D. Developing Generic Support for Doctoral Students: Practice and Pedagogy. Oxon: Routledge.

The joy of writing; or, emerging academic identities

Tags

academic identities, Desire to write, enjoying writing

by Cally Guerin

I have been visiting a number of universities lately, talking to other academics and travelling quite extensively. Fascinating as this has been, and in full recognition that it is a great privilege to have such an opportunity, I have to admit I was getting a bit frazzled by all the stimulation after a few weeks. Then I sat down at my computer to get on with some writing that had been patiently awaiting my return and suddenly I felt completely different — re-energized, focused, able to concentrate. Basically, I felt like myself again.

This experience got me thinking about the relationship between writing and academic identities. The reason I felt so good was not simply because I had retreated from all the new experiences and collegial friendships from the last few weeks; this calming sense of returning to myself seemed to be closely linked to actually doing some writing. This feeling resonated strongly with the literature that links writing and academic identities. Lots of scholars have explored this connection in detail, and if you don’t know their work already, I’d recommend:

Lee, A., & Boud, D. (2003). Writing groups, change and academic identity: Research development as local practice. Studies in Higher Education, 28(2), 187–200.

Kamler, B., & Thomson, P. (2006). Helping Doctoral Students Write: Pedagogies for Supervision. Oxford: Routledge.

Petersen, E.B. (2007). Negotiating academicity: Postgraduate research supervision as category boundary work. Studies in Higher Education, 32(4), 475–487.

Barnacle, R., & Mewburn, I. (2010). Learning networks and the journey of ‘becoming doctor’. Studies in Higher Education, 35(4), 433–444.

Baker, V.L., & Lattuca, L.R. (2010). Developmental networks and learning: Toward an interdisciplinary perspective on identity development during doctoral study. Studies in Higher Education, 35(7), 807–827.

Brew, A., Boud, D., & Namgung, S.U. (2011). Influences on the formation of academics: The role of the doctorate and structured development opportunities. Studies in Continuing Education 33(1), 51–66.

I have tried to bring some of this together in a paper on rhizomatic research cultures.

For many of us, our academic identity emerges during the process of writing a doctoral thesis. That’s a long time ago for me — and I hope some further development has happened along the way — but there are clearly strong links between what we know, what we do, and who we are. For me, at least, writing is the familiar activity that reassures me that I know what I’m doing, that allows the jumbled thoughts to find clear expression, and that reminds me this is a central focus of my job.  It tells me that I’m the kind of person who can find the words to write about ideas; I can do it in grammatical, correctly punctuated sentences; and this is partly what I get paid for. When I’m writing I feel like I’m an academic — and it feels surprisingly good.

We should encourage doctoral students to enjoy this birthing of identity that occurs in parallel with writing the thesis, allowing plenty of space for them to actually enjoy the process of writing, rather than perpetuating the notion that it’s an agonizing process undergone by a tortured genius. Instead, remind these developing scholars that there’s nothing quite like the buzz one gets when the writing goes well. I genuinely believe that this equals any pleasure one can have in academic life, with its intense concentration and heightened sense of awareness. Does any of this echo your own experience?

 

Sin, the motivator

Tags

Desire to write, science

By Susan Carter

Threatened with the prospect of possibly losing academic status while being restructured, I realized how addicted to academic writing I have become. Yes, my pay, and working with fabulous people would stay the same.

I’m addicted, though, to writing as a game, competitive, edgy, frustrating: it is a bit like cryptic crosswords only even more multi-dimensional. I like jostling in this competitive world, controlling my emotions around writing or criticism of it (including my own dissatisfaction), hunting out thought in amongst the words where it sometimes feels hard. I don’t mind it when it is hard. At least if feels real. I feel slightly guilty at recognising that writing is an addiction.

I know that guilt seems counter to the logic that in academia it is good to write. A good dotoral student is one who is writing. I’m conjuring up writing’s wicked attraction against the grain here. I’m hoping, though, that in amongst those who find writing to be hard labour, some of you will recognise that you also have at least a love hate relationship.

I did a bit of soul searching about addiction to writing and it being a sort of vanity. I almost like myself best in the way I write–I’ve got more stamina and agility as a writer than I have with almost everything else I do. Rather than feeling conspicuously embodied as a writer, for me it is voice in writing, and a sense of identity.

(If the links between knowing and being and writing a doctoral thesis interest you, see Carter, S. (2011). Original knowledge, gender and the word’s mythology: voicing the doctorate, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education.)

And consider, for example, Inger Mewburn’s “Is the university a bad boyfriend?” siting her friend’s profound realization that “The university is like a bad boyfriend. One day it is going to break your heart.” The university can only be a heart-breakingly bad boyfriend if or because we care so much about knowing, thinking, writing and entering into the exchange of ideas. Knowing more, knowing it better, and naming, owning knowledge. Saying things accurately.

Along the same lines as ‘bad boyfriend,’ at the Academic Identities Conference in Auckland this year, Eva Bendix Petersen, a keynote speaker, also used the term “bad love” to describe academics addiction to the university. However, Eva’s metaphor was more centrally addiction. She eyed us to say “You think you are an academic at a conference; I see a room full of junkies waiting for their next hit. And like junkies, you want to get young people hooked too. When a student’s eyes light up because they have learned to love your topic, yours do too because you know you have another person hooked. Your trade is secured.” Scary, or a touch of realism?

Eva was principally investigating why academics have been so compliant with the neoliberalism and commercialization of universities when we’re meant to be the consciences of society. Her answer, found through interviewing academics, was that we are hooked on our guilty pleasure for research. Our addiction is guilty because we know people out in the world often do not believe that reading, talking and writing is real work.

Could this thought about the sin of academia—vanity, desire, addiction–be of any use to motivation with doctoral writing? Or am I a complete misfit with this idea?