Designing a new doctoral research project and factoring in writing

Tags

Desire to write, Doctoral writing, Precision, Researcher identity

By Susan Carter

This afternoon I am meeting a new doctoral candidate I’ll be supervising, and I’ve already sent her a set of questions in advance of meeting. Before we begin working as a team with the other supervisor to design the doctoral project and start writing seriously, I want the candidate to do some thinking. Mostly, it’s she who must ensure that we do not get side-tracked by talk of methods, methodology, and theory from focussing on what is central: the candidate as someone already with a life that we want this doctorate to improve.

I’ve drawn these questions up, and filed them away knowing that this will be another useful document for sharing with other academics and using again myself.

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Christmas reading; doctoral writing in 2019

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Doctoral writing, Researcher identity, talking about writing

By Susan Carter

It’s customary for DoctoralWriting to begin a new year with a post based around that theme: new year’s resolutions for better doctoral writing practice. A new year offers a turning point, an invitation to audit how the previous year played out, and to plan for a productive writing year ahead with renewed energy. Here’s 2017’s new year’s post, 2015’s and 2014’s. In 2016, our new year’s post celebrated and acknowledged guest contributors. These previous year’s reflections are inspiring posts, worth looking at again. Maybe it is reasonable to approach each new year ritualistically: it is not the particularity of each new year that matters, just that each turning point offers again the chance to review and plan ahead.

I’m wondering too whether it is common that when we academics return to work after Christmas, we have spent time reading fiction over the break. In our family, a good book is a common Christmas gift, and the Christmas break is one time of the year when there may be time to read. I find that stories often give me ideas for doctoral writing workshops.

Ahoy! what is so interesting about doctoral writing?

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Doctoral writing, Emotion & writing

By Susan Carter

At the Quality in Postgraduate Research conference (April 17-19, 2018), a group of scholars came to a doctoral writing special interest group (SIG). Why, you might wonder, when writing in and of itself might seem to not be a topic with an argument to make. Most were academics who support doctoral writing, and a few were those writers themselves. I asked them to jot down what they find so interesting about doctoral writing, explaining that I would construct a blogpost from these.

Their individual responses splatter around the complexity of the process and product, and led me to the metaphor of sailing.

Turning facts into a doctoral story: the essence of a good doctorate

Tags

Doctoral writing, English language writing skills, writing skills development

By Susan Carter

Recently three experiences collided for me: getting a rejection on an article that I had co-authored; examining a thesis; and giving feedback on a literature review. They brought home how essential it is in the world of doctoral writing to turn facts, even sophisticated original facts, into a story.

I’ve known this for some time, but it was starkly demonstrated by a blitz of seeing for myself how necessary the linkages are. Readers must have narrative guides so that they feel secure they are in familiar territory as they journey through academic writing. As I circled  round each chore on my list at present, I saw that it was problematic when the story-line was lost within thickets of academic writing.

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

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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.

Supporting graduate student writers: Research, curriculum and program design (2016).

Tags

Doctoral writing, Writing as social identity; the reader as significant other

This book review is written by guest Susan Mowbray, Western Sydney University. The book seems highly pertinent to our community, so we thank Susan for alerting us to it with her detailed critique.

Supporting graduate student writers. Research, curriculum and program design. (2016). Edited by Steve Simpson, Nigel. A. Caplan, Michelle Cox & Talinn Phillips. Ann Arbour: University of Michigan Press.

Supporting graduate student writers captured my attention as I have recently taken on a literacy support role with our Graduate Research School. The idea for the book was conceived at an invited colloquium on graduate writing support in 2014 and the result of the editors’ labours arrived via the University of Michigan Press in March this year. The book is organised in three parts. Part 1: What do we know/need to know? broadly covers supporting graduate research. Curriculum is dealt with in Part 2: Issues in graduate program and curriculum design. How to acclimatise students to the contemporary university is the focus of Part 3: Program profiles. Within the three parts, 14 chapters detail issues, concerns and/or initiatives in graduate education with 11 providing insights into North American contexts and the other three presenting perspectives from Canada, Sweden and Australia. The most striking aspect of the text for me is its explicit advocacy, and example of, cooperation and collaboration amongst members of the international graduate education community. Caplan and Cox are co-founders of the online Consortium of Graduate Education and this book exemplifies their commitment to actively sharing and building knowledge and engaging with members of the global doctoral education community. I found myself nodding in agreement with many points in each chapter and dog-earring multiple pages to return to later to think and read more about the information being shared.