Thesis length: what’s the limit?

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Doctoral writing, talking about writing

By Susan Carter with Deborah Walker

At my institution, the maximum word length for a thesis is 100,000 words. Those I know who examine theses tend to think this is a good thing. But many students don’t—they find it frustratingly difficult to fit the complexity of what they want to do into that box.

I think that there are lots of benefits in doing a doctorate in an era where economy of language is mandated. Those of us who are obsessive about writing, our own and others’, know that often being forced to cut back on writing length enlivens and sharpens the prose. It forces us to say things more accurately. We have to settle on main points. Once we cut away the not-so-central strands, the writing gains a surprising authority and style. It’s better, easier to follow and more persuasive.

I did my own doctorate as an international student needing to hurry because of the high fees entailed. Now, as an academic, I still like to work to deadlines with publication. On planet earth, it seems to me, limits on things are usual: you are asked to run 100 m or run 200 m and there is no haggling about the line. We seem a species that prefers to draw frameworks round things.

And, as an academic working with doctoral students, I’ve talked to many international students who are keen to find the quickest route to completion and home again. I have watched other students go slowly grey as they linger within exquisitely intricate studies that are absolute works of art, as is their expertise. Although I can see the pleasure in this, I am not sure it is the best choice: I want them to get through the doctorate and move into ‘real’ life. Often it is when children are due that the need for more traction becomes most urgent.

Yet, arguably, that practice of thinking that pruned is better, and the very terms I have defined it in, suggests that there is only one way to handle a cat and that every cat must be short-haired. I say ‘arguably’ because I had just that argument recently, and it forced me to concede that my approach is based on my own, limited, experience.

Deborah is an academic teaching across languages and cultures. She’s interested in supervision, came to a seminar I advertised, and this allowed us to argue about whether it was pedagogically unsound to shackle thesis length to 100,000 words. Deborah is supervising a cotutelle doctorate, so her student has a French supervisor and a New Zealand one.

While in full agreement as to the importance of crisp, concise writing and realistic deadlines, she argued passionately that any French institution rightly allows a doctorate to take however much space it needs to do its work (100,000-120,000 words would be reasonably light for Humanities). She’s grateful the cotutelle regulations allow her candidate the flexibility to avoid this cookie-cutter one-size-for-all approach which limits the candidate’s ability to present her research in its entirety.

So, each of our opinions is based on our different experiences, showing multiple realities. Is there any commonality in preference?

You may have noticed that we tend to fish for comments at the end of our blog posts, but this one offers a poll. What do you think? From your point of view is it better to limit word length and time as the definition of a thesis or should we make the box bigger?

Deborah Walker-Morrison (Ngati Kahungunu / Raakai Paaka; Ngati Pahauwera) is Head of French at the University of Auckland, Aotearoa New Zealand. Her professional profile can be found at http://www.artsfaculty.auckland.ac.nz/staff/?UPI=dwal049&Name=Deborah Walker

Too small boxes and Maru the cat: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7c05gVJK7ug

Maru and big box: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2q7fw3PdFA

Literature reviews – trust yourself!

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avoiding plagiarism, Doctoral writing, literature review, trust

by Cally Guerin

Doctoral students often seem to start out feeling obliged to summarise and explain everything that has ever been written on their subject, and to do so in a politely deferential manner. Yet it seems to me that it is necessary to stand back from all that information and tell a story that puts the student’s research right at the centre in the starring role. To try and explain this, I find myself returning again and again to the ‘hands on hips’ stance that Kamler and Thomson put forward in a wonderful chapter entitled ‘Persuading an octopus into a glass: Working with literatures’ (2006).

‘Hands on hips’ strikes me as a great image for the authoritative stance that needs to be taken up in the huge shift from being an undergraduate to becoming an autonomous researcher. It helps to picture oneself standing back from all that overwhelming information in the literature in order to make some judgements about what is important, interesting, valuable and/or topical. With hands on hips it becomes easier to pose questions such as: How would I categorise all this information? What do I think about it all? How do I see those elements linking to other papers, theories and arguments in the field? What have I got to offer that others should listen to? Where is my value-add in all this?

Wisker (2005, p. 93) hits the nail on the head when she says that part of the purpose of a literature review entails entering into dialogue with the discipline. It can take awhile, though, for postgraduates to believe in themselves as scholars with something useful to say to all those other published researchers around the world who are working in the same field. It can seem much more realistic to ask sheepishly: What could I possibly say that is remotely interesting to anyone else? Yet the expectation is that doctoral writing will speak to the discipline at a global level.

So it’s necessary to talk to doctoral students about taking up the ‘hands on hips’ stance in their literature reviews. However, I’ve also been trying to push them to trust their own knowledge of the field much more than they often seem to do—and here I’m not sure if I’m standing on somewhat shakier ground.

I encourage students to stand back from their copious notes and highlighted pdfs, put their hands on their hips, and take control of the story. This is when they can start listing the main topics they need to address in the literature review. I tell students to trust themselves to know what the key themes are after all the reading they’ve done; they will remember the main concepts that must be included; they will recall the ideas that surprised them, that shocked them, that sat in opposition to what they had previously believed. I really do think that they can trust their own memory and understanding of the field for this part of the process, rather than slavishly patching together summaries of what everyone else has already written about the topic. Once they have a fairly detailed plan, THEN it’s time to go back to the literature, filling in the citations, linking their outline to what is already out there and checking all the details. Of course, it’s extremely important to go back and confirm in the literature the precise names, dates and facts to ensure that the information really is accurate and to acknowledge where it originated. They know that none of this is strictly original—it all links to the existing knowledge as presented in the literature. If anything, this process will help avoid plagiarism rather than leave material unreferenced.

But what do you think? Is it dangerous to encourage students to trust themselves this much as they launch into writing literature reviews? Am I going to regret this a little further along the track if they start imagining that they are experts on the topic long before they really do know enough? Or can this be the beginning of establishing a confident, scholarly voice as an author?

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

Wisker, G. (2005) The Good Supervisor: Supervising Postgraduate and Undergraduate Research for Doctoral Theses and Dissertations. Basingstoke & NY: Palgrave Macmillan.

A question of language competence or writing style?

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academic literacies, Doctoral writing, English language writing skills, generation 1.5, supervisor feedback

By Cally Guerin

Last week a student came to me in tears, distraught at what she felt was a very unfair assessment of her writing ability after her supervisor had decided her English was not up to scratch. She is from an Asian background, and was born and educated in Australia. While English might not be her first language or ‘mother tongue’, she is certainly not using English as an Additional Language (EAL), as the current terminology has it. (It used to be English as a Second Language, ESL, and may be moving on to English as an International Language, EIL – all of which depends on the context and perhaps the current fashions in the field.) Our universities have plenty of ‘Generation 1.5’ PhD students like her who work and think in more than one language.

Putting the labels aside, the young woman is also typical of many students who have come through the Australian school system, and is a reasonably competent writer with room for improvement – which is what one might say of at least 90% of PhD students. As academic developers we see lots of students who can write grammatically correct sentences (at least most of the time), can more or less communicate their ideas, but don’t produce particularly elegant prose. My assessment of this student’s work was that her writing fell into this category, rather than being about her language background. And perhaps she does, therefore, need some guidance in developing the academic literacies necessary for doctoral writing.

The situation has several perspectives. How can students respond to supervisors who seem to be very harsh on their writing, imposing their own personal preferences and calling it ‘an English language issue’? Most students are sharply aware of the power supervisors have over them; nonetheless, it can be frustrating to feel you have to impersonate your supervisor’s style. How do supervisors judge ethically when to insist that writing should be altered, and when they should back off and accept that it is not their own writing and doesn’t need to be in their voice? And where should thesis examiners draw the line concerning style, voice and accuracy? (Or, for that matter, journal reviewers who seem to have very specific ideas about what is ‘correct’ – but that is another story!). Is it necessary to set the highest standards right from the start? Could that be too discouraging for students, or does it prepare them for what lies ahead in the academic world? Where does reasonable academic rigour end and pettiness – that could even be construed as racist – begin?

My own experience working as an academic editor has been useful in encouraging me to think carefully about the difference between something that is incorrect, and something that is simply a matter of style. I do think that supervisors have a responsibility to help students learn the specific writing conventions of their individual disciplines, and I readily acknowledge that certain vocabulary can have vastly different connotations in particular areas. Nevertheless, it’s also important to notice what is actually right in someone’s writing, what is being achieved, what is a surface issue and what is genuinely problematic.

And feedback needs to be specific to be useful. To label all writing issues as ‘English language problems’ seems to me to be particularly unhelpful in developing writing skills for doctoral students. Many students take time to learn the disciplinary vocabulary of a new field and the accompanying conventions of research communication in their area. The language of the discipline itself can be very foreign for researchers grappling with the details of unfamiliar sub-disciplines, regardless of their own language background! Acquiring academic literacy often requires specific training at all levels of education.

Are you a Generation 1.5 doctoral student, a learning advisor who recognizes this story as a familiar one, or a supervisor of such students? How has this played out in your experience? Is it common to misunderstand these aspects of academic writing? I’d love to hear your stories about how students in similar situations have negotiated expectations about language and writing in the academic setting, how they have developed the required academic literacies, what strategies have proved useful, and what the pitfalls might be.

Writing up – an every day job

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Doctoral writing, time management, writing skills development, writing up

By Cally Guerin

The Postgraduate Students’ Association at our university recently organised a screening of the wonderful Piled Higher and Deeper Comics film. Just as heartbreakingly funny as the comic strip itself, the film explores the ‘reality’ of what it’s like to be a doctoral student. And, as one might expect, there was minimal mention of actually writing the thesis! Sure, it was set in a laboratory, and these are the students who never quite complete anything, but even so, it worries me that writing is left out all together.

We really need to wean PhD students off the idea that ‘writing up’ is something that happens at the end of the whole process. When students (especially those in the hard sciences) start making Gantt charts to create a timeframe for their doctoral studies, the temptation is to allot the last six months to writing. How do we get them to believe that this is something that needs to begin from the very start of candidature? Certainly, they’ll probably focus on the finer details of putting the whole thesis together in that last six months, ensuring that the document is properly unified, checking and re-checking the bibliographic details, updating the literature review to include the absolutely latest publications that are relevant to the topic, and completing all the final editing and careful proofreading that is required. But to think that the bulk of the writing can be undertaken in six months is not realistic for the vast majority of PhD students. Is this your experience – as an academic developer, supervisor, or student? We’re keen to hear stories that prove or disprove this! Perhaps there are other important reasons the ‘writing up’ model endures.

I run academic development sessions for PhD students and see lots of students who are keen to come along to writing workshops at the beginning of their candidature; they appear to be eager to get as much input as possible starting out on such a big project. In my Australian context, there is generally significantly less coursework in the early stages than is usual in the US, for example, and Australian universities tend not to insist on participation in courses on composition and rhetoric. Structured doctoral programmes are not yet standard practice in most Australian institutions.

Then, I notice that as students move further into their research, the focus on data collection (in whatever form that might be – field work, laboratory experiments, reading ancient documents in dusty archives) often starts to take precedence, and the writing falls into the background. Meanwhile, much of what has been covered in the early workshops is relegated to the ‘must remember that for later’ basket, where it can be overshadowed as all sorts of other research information crowds in.

However, we know that for the vast majority of doctoral students it’s good to start writing early and keep writing. I want to get the message across that writing is a skill that requires maintenance and regular practice, especially for those of us for whom it doesn’t necessarily come easily. The reason for providing writing development workshops near the beginning of candidature is precisely so that there is time over the next three or four years to hone those skills. Until students start doing some serious writing, it is hard to have an accurate picture of where their writing difficulties might lie.

So this is a plea to encourage doctoral students to believe that writing a thesis nearly always takes longer than one imagines, and writing skills can’t be developed overnight. If the habit of writing every day (well, most days, anyway!) can be established early, those last few months will be more manageable. Doctoral education is partly about training students to become independent researchers, and being able to think of writing as an activity that happens every day is central to that identity.

Welcome to the first post of the DoctoralWritingSIG – A message from Claire, Cally, Susan and Inger

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Doctoral writing, research writing, thesis writing

We thought this first post should serve the purpose of introducing ourselves and outlining how we envisage this space might work. (See also the ‘About’ page.)  As a group we have been working together learning, or trying to!, the technology and the genres of blogging.  It’s most likely you’ve already realised that Inger has been thrown into the role of teacher, mentor, problem solver… We’re very grateful to her for her enthusiasm, her time and expertise -and especially for your patience, Inger! Since we first came up with this idea in April 2012 we have been chugging along sometimes smoothly, often in fits and starts, deciding on what is needed and how we might go about learning, making and creating a forum for people who are interested in conversations about doctoral writing.

It’s been a fabulous journey – and although none of us are yet ‘experts’, and we concede to considerable nervousness … we’ve decided to launch DoctoralWritingSIG now; to treat it as a work in progress and to iron out problems as we grow and develop. Let’s hope we don’t trip up over the technology too often.

Blog management

Our plan is to share responsibility for the site and for posting blogs on a monthly basis. So you will see the style and flavour may change according to who is in the driver’s seat at the time. What will be constant, however, is our focus on doctoral writing and our desire to engage others with this similar interest.

We hope you will engage with us  by responding to posts; sharing your work, and the work of others, on the topic of doctoral writing; authoring a post and sending it to us to be posted here–and telling us if there is more that you would like to do or feel someone should be doing. 

Best wishes C, C, I and S