Doctoral writing: to think ideas or to sell them to the reader?

Tags

Accurate word choice, English language writing skills, Precision, thesis editing, Writing as social identity; the reader as significant other, writing skills development

by Susan Carter

This morning a colleague who was to provide a workshop for doctoral students phoned in sick. Stepping in at short notice to replace her, I’m used Amanda Wolf’s four sentence formula for writing a research proposal in the workshop.  As we worked through Amanda’s exercise, I noticed how this great post is an exercise about writing to sell ideas to the reader rather than an exercise in writing to think. In this blog I ponder two related aspects arising from my fill-in workshop using Amanda’s sentence formula.

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Reverse engineering of writing: Reading to see how ‘good, interesting writing’ works

Tags

argumentation, English language writing skills, Precision, writing skills development

By Susan Carter

This post draws heftily on Gina Wisker’s website, the Good Supervisor, and directs readers to it: read to the bottom of this post for the password! Meanwhile, the post gives an example of one of Gina’s exercises that doctoral writers could undertake to improve their writerly skills. It’s a series of reverse-engineering prompts designed to help doctoral students learn how to ‘notice’ (Kumar & Kumar, 2009) the strategies that good research writers use. I noticed that Gina Wisker says to pick ‘good interesting’ exemplars—that is exactly the kind of writing that early career researchers should be encouraged to notice and aspire to produce.

Here’s Gina’s exercise.

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.

Doctoral writing: Exercises for stylish writing

Tags

Accurate word choice, English language writing skills, Precision, writing skills development

By Susan Carter

To what extent should those of us who support doctoral writing aim to help candidates to write succinctly, clearly and with a control that makes reading smooth and even pleasurable? I puzzle over that, aware of what a marathon writing task the thesis presents, how emotionally challenging doctoral writing can be, how life can throw study off-centre and what an extraordinary amount of diligence has often gone into learning English as an additional language to the level of fluency and sophistication required at doctoral level. Might it demoralize doctoral writers to include tips about further authorial skill with feedback on content, structure, and ideas?

Achieving writing precision: applying simple activities to complex thesis writing

Tags

Accurate word choice, argumentation, English language writing skills, Precision

By Susan Carter

When…you Think of Things, you find sometimes that a Thing which seemed very Thingish inside you is quite different when it gets out in the open and has other people looking at it.                                   (A. A. Milne, 1961, p. 101)

In last week’s workshop with a group of doctoral students, we began by talking about what was puzzling, troubling or interesting people currently about their doctoral writing. A couple agreed that it was really hard to put ideas that are good in the mind onto a page–like Pooh Bear above, they found quite good thoughts somehow looked much less convincing in a draft of writing.

Some common disgruntlements emerged: feeling your own writing is boring to read and boring to write, and wondering whether the current writing might not end up in the thesis so feeling all that work might be a waste of time.

The potentiality of ideas seemed to be shut down when packaged into linear writing, in the same way that the pleasure of having inviting purchase options is gone once you spend your cash. You get one thing, and that is all.

A challenge those with English as an Additional Language agreed on, however, was how hard writing was at doctoral level, because ‘literacy’ suddenly became ‘much more complicated.’ So this week, we met again for a small exercise that comes from Linda Evans on developing precision in expression.

It begins asking students to take approximately three minutes to write down a good definition of a chair.

‘Insider persona’ in voice: practical suggestions for doctoral writers

Tags

Accurate word choice, English language writing skills

By Susan Carter

We know that one outcome of the successful thesis is a fully-fledged researcher who has been accepted as an insider into their research community. How can doctoral students demonstrate through their writing that they are insiders? Berkenkotter and Huckin (1995) found that reviewers of 441 submitted conference abstracts had four criteria for acceptance or rejection. One was the sense that the author projected ‘an insider persona’.

Reviewers liked abstracts whose authors accurately portrayed relevant literature, used the right terminology but also sounded as though they would deliver a publishable paper. Thesis writers want that same sense in what they submit: a thesis should seem publishable, and is stronger when the writing has a confidence to it.

Here are some quite simple practical tips for gaining a sense of authority by writing more clearly.