Best use of exemplars for doctoral writing

Tags

English language writing skills, Writing motivation, writing skills development

By Douglas Eacersall and Cristy Bartlett, with Susan Carter

It’s common that as supervisors and advisors we tell doctoral candidates to get online and look at other theses—any theses that can be found online are successful and available for students to get ideas for how to write their own. This post comes from Douglas and Cristy who took the time in their institution to build a library of full thesis proposals, those documents that candidates need to satisfy first year review and confirm their registration in the doctoral programme. They described their work in a DoctoralWriting Conversation in which they also discussed their book chapter on preparing students for candidature review – Confirmation of candidature: An autoethnographic reflection from the dual identities of student and research administrator.

To some extent, that is another story, and at the end of this post, there is a little more on how to gather examples of that quite covert genre, the full thesis proposal. What this post focuses on, though, is the advice that can be given to doctoral candidates so that they make effective use of exemplars of any item of doctoral writing.

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It’s easy to get interested in the research described in completed theses, so that attention wanders away from the task of learning from them about doctoral writing per se. We think candidates could be reminded that they are workers upskilling in research expertise—the expertise of writing and persuading a discourse community that you belong within it. I was going to write that use of exemplars is part of apprenticeship training, but I haven’t because it is something that I still do as an experienced academic, for example, when wanting to see if a particular journal might accept my work. Maybe it is best to simply say that exemplar use can be helpful and a means to guide our practice and learning at any stage of the research journey.  As such the content below can be used to inform not only doctoral writing but research writing more broadly, beyond the doctorate.

Using exemplars to guide your work

Exemplars can be a useful way to understand the expectations and quality required for assessment (Bell, Mladenovic, and Price 2013). Doctoral writing exemplars show possible approaches and are never the definitive answer for a particular research project. There are many ways to fulfil the requirements of doctoral writing. Exemplars provide general and specific examples, both of which can be used to inform the research project and approaches to doctoral writing.  The points below may assist with this.  

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You may not find an exact match for your research topic or discipline area, nevertheless exemplars from a different topic or discipline can still be useful. 

Look for general approaches in the exemplar that can inform your specific approach. This could include:

• Overall structuring– What headings and subheadings are used? Approximately how many items are in the reference list? What proportion of text is given to the common headings in research and doctoral writing , introducing the topic, establishing a gap in knowledge, contextualizing the study in other literature, explaining and defending methods and theory, describing findings, discussing their meaning and wrapping the work up with a conclusion? Could the exemplar structure be used for your writing?
• The research gap and likely original contribution – how does the exemplar convince you as a reader that the research project is worthwhile? What sort of literature review shows that there is a gap, and that it matters significantly that it should be filled?
• Literature review – How is the literature review structured? How is the literature discussed? Can you find specific concrete examples of when the author demonstrates their critical analysis of the literature they review? Can you see how literature is used to justify the author’s methods, approaches, and attitudes? Once you have noticed the kind of language used for this important work, can you translate it into your own study? Could this approach work for your literature review?
• Methodology – Although many research projects have different topics, they all need to describe methods and justify them with a methodology. How good is the exemplar at describing the methods and analysis? How do they draw on previous studies to do this? How do they defend their choices within the methodology? How much theory drives analysis or underpins the study? What elements does the methodology section cover? How are the elements of the methodology section discussed? Can this approach inform the methodology you plan to use in your project?
• Findings – How is clarity achieved in reporting findings? Any useful phrases that are used in the writing?
• Discussion – How does the author orient their research within the discipline? How do they make the meaning of their findings clearly visible? Are there rhetorical strategies for showing the significance of findings?
• Conclusion – It can be really difficult writing a good conclusion, summing up the project strongly. How does this example foreground the significance of the study? How do they describe limitations without making their own work seem worthless?
• Tone and style—is this flat, concrete language or opaque, theoretical language? Or does tone shift over different parts of the writing? Is it pleasurable or hard to read? Would you want to cultivate a similar voice or a very different one?

Douglas and Cristy recognised the benefit of having a library of full proposals, and found that supervisors and doctoral candidates within their institution were generally willing to add to this collection, creating a valuable resource for first year candidates wondering what such a document should look like. They talked about this project and you can find a summary of this in the DoctoralWriting conversations.

There may be more to add to this pedagogical approach—there’s some research, mostly based on using exemplars for teaching English as an additional language (e.g., Smyth & Carless, 2021) that insists that the use of exemplars needs to be managed. If research on teaching by using exemplars interests you, you could check out To, Panadero & Carless’s (2021) systematic review.

Now, we expect that doctoral candidates, who are survivors within academia, should be fine with exemplars and a check-list prompt of what to look for, but we think the addition of a workshop would give the opportunity to explicitly point out strengths and weaknesses of the exemplars. But maybe we are wrong on that…If you use exemplars for your own writing or as a learning tool for your students, we would like to hear about it, so please leave a comment. Douglas and Cristy are also happy to discuss the ins and outs of setting up an exemplar database at your institution.

References 

Bell, A., Mladenovic, R., & Price, M. (2013). Students’ perceptions of the usefulness of marking guides, grade descriptors and annotated exemplars. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 38(7), 393-406. doi:10.1080/02602938.2012.714738

Smyth, P. & Carless, D. Theorising how teachers manage the use of exemplars: Towards mediated learning from exemplars. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, 46(3), 769-788, doi: 10.1080/02602938.2020.1781785

To, J., Panadero, E. & Carless, D. (2021). A systematic review of the educational uses and effects of exemplars. Assessment and Evaluation in Higher Education, doi: doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2021.2011134

A, the, an or some? Articles with abstract nouns in doctoral writing

Tags

writing skills development, English language writing skills

By Susan Carter

Whenever I correct articles in doctoral writing, I get tangled trying to explain why, and often, like now, can only conclude that English is a sod of a language with tricky slithery rules that you simply have to learn and apply. Rules with English grammar do not always have an apparent logic. Those little prefixes to nouns, the troupe of articles, are as troublesome for many doctoral writers as getting journal articles published is for others.

It’s quite hard sometimes deciding whether a noun needs an article, and which one it might need. That is because many nouns in research writing are abstract, sometimes influenced by theory. It’s sometimes hard to tell whether abstracts are countable or uncountable, for example.  This post grapples with the task of suggesting how to make those ‘to article or not to article’ decisions.

Creative arts and industries: the practice-based arts voice

Tags

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.

Managing doctoral writing in English as an additional language (EAL): Supervisor perspective

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English language writing skills, feedback on writing, Feedback practices, supervisor feedback

By Susan Carter

It is not new news that it is tough to write a whole thesis in formal academic prose in English when it isn’t your first language—Sabrina Islam’s post last week showed her strategic approaches to managing this massive challenge. She suggested an inclusive set of attitudes and actions that candidates can adapt.

The supervisor perspective matters in amongst practice too. I know that supervisors worry about supporting international or other EAL candidates’ writing because a few years back I did a research project and got data from 226 accredited supervisors. I was curious as to whether the challenges of sustaining doctoral writing were different across discipline, and sort of expected that they would because the prose styles differ between empirical science and Arts Humanities research writers. I didn’t ask about international or EAL writers, but 66 supervisors mentioned them. A few were negative, most felt that it took more work, and a few felt that international students were the best.  Most comments were that the considerable extra time spent on teaching English literacy at the highest level ever demanded of writers, doctoral writing, meant less time for feedback at deeper levels: content, theory, structure, ideas. This post is based on a workshop I host on this topic for supervisors.

Voice in doctoral writing: what is it? and can it be taught?

Tags

English language writing skills, Researcher identity, Writing as social identity; the reader as significant other

By Susan Carter

This post reports on a workshop that proved illuminating, leading me to think that closer investigation of voice could be a research project for the future. Are the doctoral students you know conscious of developing their own voices in their writing, or still experimenting to find it, or a bit confused as to what voice actually is? And is this something that as supervisors we are certain about ourselves and can give support for?

Doctoral writing: Are you ready to unlearn what you have learnt?

Tags

thesis writing, research writing, writing skills development, English language writing skills

By Trang Thu Thi Nguyen, a doctoral candidate in her third year at the University of Auckland. Trang presented these thoughts as a conference paper at the Higher Education Research Development Society Conference (July 205, 2019, Auckland), highlighting one challenge for international doctoral students writing in English as an Additional Language. 

The international language test IELTS (International English Language Testing System) has become part of the educational scene in many countries, particularly when it is an internationally recognized test for admission to university education.

In Vietnam, IELTS was first introduced about 20 years ago and it fitted in quite smoothly with the country’s exam-oriented educational system. Since then, as the importance of English for a globalized world has been recognized, the popularity of IELTS has continued increasing. IELTS-oriented language training has become a big business. A large number of private language centres offer IELTS preparation courses as part of their English training programs to meet the demands of a growing number of Vietnamese students who want to undertake tertiary study in English-speaking countries.

In the university sector, some language education institutions have set an IELTS score of 6.5 as a graduation requirement for English-majored students. For example, this is the usual standard required in Australian universities now. The test’s washback impact on English Language Teaching in the Vietnamese context is quite visible. IELTS preparation has been integrated into extended academic writing programs for English-majored students. English instructors have referred to types of IELTS essays to devise academic writing syllabi. After the IELTS writing rubrics were publicized recently, its band descriptors have become a guideline that helps English teachers shape their instruction. It is thought that the rubrics represent examiners’ expectations and aligning instruction with the rubrics would help students achieve high scores in the IELTS academic module writing tests.

But I propose that the test is limited as an indicator of preparedness for doctoral study. In their research of into IELTS preparation in New Zealand, Read and Hayes (2003) discovered teachers’ reservations about IELTS. Teachers in this study were concerned that students who passed IELTS with band scores of 6.0 or 6.5 may still be poorly prepared for writing demands in Anglophone academic cultures. The band scores, whether global or analytical, were seen as problematic. Researchers argue that the complex features of writing cannot be reduced to narrow descriptions of a single rubric (Storch, 2009, p.106). The opinionated feature of IELTS writing seems to contradict guides for university academic writing (Moore & Morton, 2007, p.198). Doctoral writing requires critical analysis of literature and arguments which demonstrate theoretical savvy. The authenticity of IELTS writing tasks is, therefore, questionable.

I would like to extend the cautious perspectives towards IELTS with my personal observations. The chance to immerse myself in the academic culture of doctoral writing has prompted me to recognize that there are divergences between my previous IELTS-based writing training and what writing experts suggest for academic writing. I want to illustrate such divergences with concrete sentence-level examples.

When I studied IELTS writing tasks, I was advised to frequently use linking words. As instructed on an IELTS training website, “the examiner needs to see a range of linking words in your essay to award you a high score for the criterion of ‘Coherence and Cohesion’ which is 25% of your mark”. But, in fact, linking words are not employed as frequently in academic writing as I used to think. Ideas are internally linked to each other. The internal link is created by the logicality of flow. It does not need to be explicitly displayed by connectors. While connectors are useful, an over-supply may interrupt fluidity (Hinkel, 2003).

What was encouraged in my previous academic writing training was the extensive use of complex sentences. We were provided with what was called “a golden rule” for IELTS writing. The rule says that “if there are 12 sentences in an essay, 2 sentences are simple sentences, 3 are compound sentences and the rest are complex sentences”. These ideas are not totally applicable to doctoral writing. Long sentences sometime lack clarity and cause readers to get lost. Short sentences may be more powerful in some cases, particularly in delivering emphasis (Carter, personal communication, November 26^th, 2018). In fact, when to use simple or complex sentences depends on rhetorical purposes.A combination of different sentence types would be desirable.

Using passive voice is not as highly recommended as I had thought. When I did writing courses in Vietnam, I was fed the idea that English was characterized by the high frequency of passive voice in written discourse. English instructors provided exercises and tests which required learners to change active sentences into passive sentences. The drill of transforming active sentences into passive sentences created a false impression that passive sentences are more appropriate in academic writing than active sentences. Why didn’t they ask learners to make changes in the reverse direction? As Sword (2007) comments, we want to make our academic writing have life instead of existing as the living dead—see her TED talk on “zombie nouns”. Active verbs and active voice energize our writing. Too many “to be” verbs would turn our writing into static prose.

The above divergences may have little to do with the IELTS writing test itself but more with the Vietnamese teachers’ interpretation of the test and its assessment criteria which in turn impacted their instruction. However, instruction which is test-oriented and aims at helping students to pass the IELTS test only may end up teaching students writing habits that are not useful. Though IELTS writing tasks are a good start for academic writing training, it is essential to raise awareness that the power of the test in preparing students to postgraduate academic writing should be interpreted with caution. Language teachers should not let IELTS dominate their instruction. As for students, “passing” an IELTS test does not necessarily lead to success in academic writing tasks at the tertiary level in general and doctoral level in particular. Old habits die hard but it is necessary sometimes to unlearn what has been learnt.

References

Moore, T. & Morton, J. (2007). Authenticity in the IELTS Academic Module Writing Test: A comparative study of Task 2 Items and University Assignments. In L.B.Taylor & P.Falvey (Eds.), IELTS collected papers: Research in speaking and writing assessment (pp.197-248). New York: Cambridge University Press.

Read, J. & Hayes, B. (2003). The impact of IELTS on preparation for academic study in New Zealand. In T. Robyn (Ed.), International English Language Testing System (IELTS) Research Reports 2003 (pp.153-191). Canberra: IDP.

Hinkel, E. (2003). Adverbial markers and tone of L1 and L2 students’ writing. Journal of Pragmatics, 35(7). 1049-1068.

Storch, N. (2009). The impact of studying in a second language (L2) medium university on the development of L2 writing. Journal of Second Language Writing, 18, 103-118.

Sword, H. (2007). The Writer’s Diet. New Zealand: Pearson.

Sword, H. (no date) Beware of nominalizations (AKA zombie nouns). Available at https://ed.ted.com/lessons/beware-of-nominalizations-aka-zombie-nouns-helen-sword