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.

What level of English competence is enough for doctoral students?

Tags

English competence, English language writing skills, ESL writing, Grammar

By Cally Guerin

In recent weeks I’ve been involved in a number of different situations focused on assessing the English language skills of international students, which has made me think yet again about what is most important in this regard for those entering the world of doctoral writing. An article in Times Higher Education served as a timely reminder that this continues to be a vexed issue at all levels of university study in this era of internationalisation. It is also useful to remember just how complex it is to accurately assess language levels, especially under high-stakes exam conditions.

In Australia, the International English Language Testing System (IELTS) is commonly used to determine English language competency. All four language skills (reading, writing, speaking and listening) are tested in four separate parts of the exam. Another widely accepted language test, the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL), is conducted online and includes tasks that integrate writing, reading and listening.

At my current university, international students are required to have an entry level IELTS score of 6.5 or higher. This is equivalent to the 79-93 range in TOEFL. But what do these numbers mean? IELTS explains:

Band 7: Good user
Has operational command of the language, though with occasional inaccuracies, inappropriacies and misunderstandings in some situations. Generally handles complex language well and understands detailed reasoning.

Band 6: Competent user
Has generally effective command of the language despite some inaccuracies, inappropriacies and misunderstandings. Can use and understand fairly complex language, particularly in familiar situations.

According to this measurement, our students are usually somewhere in between. (For more information, go to http://www.ielts.org/institutions/test_format_and_results/ielts_band_scores.aspx.)

This may sound adequate, but what 6.5 or 79-93 looks like in real life may seem like quite a lot of inaccuracies to some supervisors faced with drafts of their students’ writing. Maybe most sentences have small errors such as absent or misused articles (a, the), uncountable nouns used as plurals (researches or evidences), lack of agreement between subject and verb (participants has reported), or wrong word forms (have observe).

On the whole, I’m not too fussed about what I would regard as ‘surface errors’ like these. So long as the sentence structure is more or less in place, and the reader can understand what the student is getting at, I am more than willing to work with that. But I am aware that as a former English language teacher I bring particular skills to this task that others may not necessarily have.

Working as an editor for academics whose first language was not English also taught me useful lessons about writing and English competence. In that position my employing company policy stated that editors were not to intervene with ‘corrections’ unless there was actually a mistake – it was not regarded as appropriate to impose personal or stylistic preferences on others’ writing. There is an important distinction between actual errors and personal preferences that is relevant to doctoral students too. When we urge doctoral writers to ‘find your own voice’, they may choose to include some stylistic quirks that are not strictly conventional in academic writing, yet communicate valuable aspects of their own perspective on the topic. Again, it’s necessary to consider whether or not it is ‘wrong’, or whether it might be quite acceptable to many academic readers.

I think it’s also very important to recognise what an author is achieving in their writing, rather than focusing on what is not grammatically accurate. For example, doctoral writers should be commended for successfully ensuring that all the relevant information is present and properly referenced; that the overall argument is structured into a logical sequence; and that the headings and paragraphing clearly communicate the central ideas. Instead of noticing only what’s wrong with the writing, supervisors can encourage students by taking time to acknowledge what is right with it too. On the path towards developing writing skills, such positive feedback can be very heartening.

But lots of other supervisors are less comfortable—and much more impatient—with what I would regard as an acceptable level of English language competency. So where do you draw the line regarding how much English is enough? Do you expect the first draft to be entirely free of any grammar errors? Do you find yourself reworking nearly every sentence so that in the end it feels as if you’ve written the entire thesis yourself? What would you like the English language entry level to be for doctoral candidates at your university? I suspect that many of our readers have very strong opinions on this topic and it would be great to hear from you.

When writing a PhD dissertation in English is “like knitting a sweater without knowing whether there is enough yarn”

Tags

bilingual writers, Danish PhD students, English language writing skills, thesis writing

By Tine Wirenfeldt Jensen, Gitte Wichmann-Hansen and Stacey Cozart, Aarhus University, Denmark.

The globalization of higher education can sometimes be a very abstract concept, a term we keep repeating without it having any real implications for our personal lives in academia. But one aspect of this trend towards globalization does involve one of the most personal areas of all – our language and thereby our very identities. More and more doctoral students are writing their dissertations (as monographs or journal articles) in English – the language of globalization. In Denmark as well as in other Scandinavian countries, this development is often not thought of as an issue: after all, Danish doctoral students generally have such excellent oral skills in English that some are perceived as being bilingual. And when doctoral students interact with their international – non-native English-speaking – peers, their own belief in their superior skills in English is confirmed. But what happens when they take on the task of writing a dissertation in academic English? Does having excellent oral communication skills necessarily mean that writing a dissertation in a foreign language, in a genre that is new to them, is smooth sailing? And if they do encounter difficulties, how are they able to frame and experience these difficulties as doctoral students?

We looked into this question as part of a two-year multi-institutional research seminar focusing on critical transitions in writing in higher education. Our case study focused on the writing experiences and challenges of PhD students at the faculty of Arts at Aarhus University, Denmark. It shows that writing a dissertation in English is, in fact, not without difficulties for PhD students. Even though lots of the students writing in English confidently rate their writing skills as very good or good, almost half state that they do have concerns about writing their dissertation in English.

We asked the students to complete the sentence “Writing in English is like…/Writing in Danish is like…”. Their answers point to the difficulties and insecurities experienced in connection with writing in English. This student answer is an incisive example: While writing in Danish is like “playing a grand piano based on 30 years’ experience”, writing in English is like “beating on a little tin xylophone without any guidance. In the dark.”

Other examples of metaphor pairs for writing in Danish and English are: Writing in Danish is like “…driving on a freeway while my supervisor occasionally tells me to switch to the academic lane”, while writing in English is like “…driving on a freeway with holes in the asphalt”. Writing in Danish is like “…shaping clay”, while writing in English is like “…knitting a sweater without knowing whether there is enough yarn”. Just like the majority of the students’ metaphor pairs, these examples underline the students’ difficulties transitioning from Danish to English, in particular their sense of alienation, inadequacy and lack of creativity in connection with writing in English.

In order to handle these issues, the doctoral students need to be able to assume an identity as “language learner”, but the structural framework of the doctoral programs does not offer a legitimate space for them to do so. There are no mandatory courses in academic English, no formal or informal assessments of students’ writing skills in English, nor any frameworks for discussing students’ writing issues or concerns about writing in English in the doctoral supervision context. No institutional space is made available for discussing these quite complex issues, and if the students want to do so, they must carve out this space individually.

What the institution is communicating to the PhD student who pictures writing in English as ”knitting a sweater without knowing whether there is enough yarn” is that there should be enough yarn – that doctoral students are simply expected to have the ability to write a dissertation in English with little or no support. And – in a sense – that if this is not the case, the students’ “doctoral student” identity is somewhat flawed.

What is striking is how unfounded this expectation is. More than two thirds of the students in our study who stated that they are writing their dissertation in English had never attended a course in academic English, and one third had virtually no experience of writing academic texts in English when they began their PhD studies.

The consequence of these implicit expectations is that the students are very much left to themselves – left to decide what language to write their dissertation in, to assess their own language skills, to seek out courses and other kinds of support on their own. And they are also left alone with the task of negotiating the impact on their self-perception when faced with difficulties writing a dissertation in English – this context can’t allow them to legitimately occupy the space of being a doctoral student and an advanced language learner at the same time.

Importantly, the difficulties these students experience are not the result of a personal shortcoming but of an institutional blind spot toward the idea that even the nearly bilingual Danish PhD students may only be beginning to develop their English academic writing skills. Our study has made it clear to us that understanding the role played by the different identities available to young scholars is crucial. We as institutions, researchers, supervisors and language teachers must work towards making it legitimate for students to assume the identities of advanced language learner and doctoral student at the same time – without the one identity undermining the other.

We would be very interested to hear about similar dilemmas in other contexts.

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All three of our guest authors this week work at Aarhus University in Denmark. They are educational developers within Higher Education, and have extensive experience working with students’ writing processes, text feedback, and doctoral supervision. Together they compose a research team on Doctoral Writing. Tine is a part-time lecturer and PhD student at the Centre for Teaching Development and Digital Media in the Faculty of Arts. Gitte is an associate professor and research manager at the Center for Teaching and Learning, School of Business and Social Sciences. Stacey is a senior consultant with the Centre for Teaching Development and Digital Media at the Faculty of Arts.

Citing correctly and avoiding plagiarism: In the grey zone

Tags

English language writing skills, plagiarism

By Susan Carter

My institution’s guidelines state that “Those who use material which is not produced by them have a responsibility to make its status and origins quite clear to those to whom it is presented (5.2).” Well, sure. That sounds nice and straightforward. We have also built an on-line academic integrity module that students are required to complete. This is in line with practice elsewhere aimed to prevent plagiarism.

However, those who work with doctoral writing know that citation is not always straightforward and tidy. There’s a grey zone between what must and needn’t be cited—and it can seem to grow foggier as the writer advances into being a fully blown researcher.

Like others, our official sites make it clear that even if you are genuinely unaware that you separated an author’s work from the citation details, this doesn’t let you off the hook. But unaware separation can happen as doctoral students cut and paste through seemingly infinite iterations. When you first write some idea based on someone else’s, you are aware of the authorial boundaries. As years pass between this iteration and the final one, it’s possible to lose track of where ideas came from: you’ve read those words outside of the direct quotation markers so often that they seem your own. Students are rightly nervous about plagiarising unintentionally.

And, how do you decide what is ‘common knowledge’ and what belongs to a thinker? Some facts are clear cut; others, much less so. With theoretical terms, must one still give a reference with a page number for terms that have now become common coinage? Can I just say ‘citation works as a model of the Foucaultian panopticon’ and call it quits at that, or would I need to trundle back to ascertain Foucault’s early date and page number?

It tends to be that as time passes, increasingly some disciplines feel that a theoretical term is simply part of the shared language. Occasionally a diligent doctoral student points out that the same term is treated differently in current publications–there seems not to be a clear system in play. The decision as to whether a term has reached that ripeness of being detachable from its author seems to be subjective: it depends partly on the discipline, the supervisor and, most scarily, the examiner—or maybe on the journal and editor when publication is at stake. The decision has a social context.

Some thesis writers have difficulty with the joinery that separates out another author’s thoughts from their own. You need meticulous care with sign-posts on all corners when an author’s ideas are enfolded by your own. It gets worse when you engage with more than one piece of literature, as is often the case in a doctoral thesis.

So in the doctoral session on citing and avoiding plagiarism that I put together with Frances Kelly, we use examples and exercises to work with that let us all talk round how to do it. We look at discipline preferences for citation and summary. We make use of literature on citation—I’ve listed some below. We have a quiz and a court-case example.  We practice summarising and then talk about our various strategies. The talk is helpful.

Nonetheless, we recommend that supervisors/advisors should be consulted with specific examples till the student feels they have got the hang of how their discipline does it, and how it’s done in English language, in Western culture. Learning advisors are not fully savvy in all disciplines, this seems an area where their instincts can’t be relied upon.

There’s another invitingly itchy rub from a pedagogical perspective. Lisa Samuels (2002) picks this up in ‘Relinquish Intellectual Property’, a manifesto worth reading for its sheer stylishness alone.

She pushes me to reflect that ‘standing on the shoulders of giants’ doesn’t capture the numerous generations of thinkers and all those people you have discussed points with who contribute to how you think and, yes, maybe scrupulous guarding of intellectual property misses the main point.

Note, though, that I am carefully referencing Samuels, because this is one of those situations where authorship–ownership of idea–is hers not mine. Her manifesto is a personal point of view. It won’t work as a defence against plagiarism.

The cynic in me suspects institutions flatten this issue out to avoid culpability should students miss the mark. This is one of the many areas where supervisors and learning advisors need to pick up the slack. Any suggestions on how?

Samuels, L. (2002). New Literary History 33.2: 357-374

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/new_literary_history/v033/33.2samuels.html

A question of language competence or writing style?

Tags

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.