How much information is too much? Content for writing workshops

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feedback on writing, writing skills development, writing workshops

By Cally Guerin

In planning upcoming workshops, I remembered a student who had responded to a long and detailed session by feeling rather discouraged. He had been making good progress with his writing, but the information in the workshop (focused on structure and argumentation) had unsettled him – it suddenly seemed that the ideas being presented undermined his own approach and made him feel that he had failed to pay attention to all sorts of elements that might be important to examiners later on.

For me, this was a valuable reminder not only of how fragile the confidence of doctoral students can be in the face of examination, but also that well-intentioned attempts to provide helpful information can sometimes be destructive.

Doctoral writing and decision-making in the first few months

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feedback on writing, research questions, thesis writing

By Susan Carter

I’m working with a promising new doctoral student and conversations are mainly around scoping her project. I’ll call her Angel, although she has kept her Chinese name. Our talk circles round the decisions that need to be made in the first year, and preferably in the first few months. It’s a process of thinking, choosing and writing. First, decisions are approached at several different levels.

We begin with identifying the problem that is driving the research. I want her to write that clearly. This leads to how her doctoral project might produce better understanding the problem with a goal to mitigating it. One set of considerations hovering through our talk regards methods and methodology.

When doctoral students can’t develop their writing skills: What helps?

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feedback on writing, supervisor feedback, talking about writing, writing skills development

By Susan Carter

The question in the title is not rhetorical: this post is keen to receive suggestions from both doctoral students and academics on how to help doctoral students learn to control their academic writing.

Here’s an example: explaining the mechanics of writing proved hard in a recent peer review group with one woman who just didn’t get it. Each meeting, she found others’ writing ‘really good’, while agreeing that the formative feedback on her own writing really improved it. Why couldn’t she learn how to give good feedback from receiving helpful feedback on her own work? Why didn’t this help her learn to self review?

This woman was highly intelligent; as such, she trusted her own evaluation that she simply was never going to become good at academic writing. She had tried other writing support before attending our classes. Her writing hadn’t improved, mostly because the instruction didn’t make sense to her. She was sure that she could never write well enough to be published.

After the class, as facilitators we did a post mortem. Could we have managed this better as teachers? We considered whether it was an advantage or disadvantage that the group was small. It had worked well for the others; one student celebrated that understanding the ‘formula’ for a paragraph had enabled her to write more fluidly and produce clearer writing—she rocketed ahead. Others made break-throughs too. That others seemed to be moving ahead happily probably made it worse for this sharp-witted student who seemed unable to revise her own writing.

I have also heard from supervisors who bemoan the fact that, although they try to explain the notion of logical forward progression, the need for a narrative, and for connections, some students continue to lack a sense of how writing structure affects meaning. As a learning advisor, I spend hundreds of hours with students on the other side of the conversation who find supervisor feedback puzzling. (Difficulty may be often due to communication between two people who interpret things differently.) My own approaches include the following:

• always give feedback first on content and then on mechanics;
• praise what works well, dissecting why;
• compare what is not working to what is (‘you do this well over here’);
• scaffold support with English language, not too much at once;
• work with one section and request that the same principle be applied throughout;
• direct students to other resources, e.g., learning centres, guides, digital resources;
• keep exemplars that can be used as models;
• ask students to look for well-written articles and explain why they enjoyed the style;
• explain with metaphors to make writing revision less emotional, more practical;
• set up peer review groups.

Usually, this combination, adapted to suit the situation, keeps my research students progressing in their control of writing—and as I work through these approaches with them, I’m often alerted myself to ways I could write more strongly.

Yet, I am aware from the student in my writing class that some very clued up people simply don’t connect to the workings of language in formal academic prose. Are there alternative ways to explain the points about academic writing that would help someone who really has trouble with language mechanics?

If you are a student, or have a student, with a story that goes “Did not get it until…” I would love to hear from you. Stories could be pastiched together for a sequel post: suggestions based on student experience.

Peer review of writing: the mechanics of how

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Accurate word choice, feedback on writing, structuring argument, talking about writing, writing fun, Writing motivation, writing retreat

By Susan Carter

Doctoral peer review of writing seems like wise practice to me. It widens the source of feedback: if students have any dissatisfaction with the way their supervisors review their writing, quite simply, they can supplement that elsewhere. The groups I run are generic, with people bringing writing from any discipline. Groups can be really productive within departments or faculties, or can be, like mine, centrally situated.

Setting up a group recently where there was some initial uncertainty about how to give helpful feedback to colleagues, I set out some criteria. Since no one could think of more to add, we set out with this as guidance:

Watch out for emotions. You will get the most from the session if you are open to critical feedback, but try to gauge how much advice works best for you as an individual. Then as a reviewer take care according to the sensitivity climate. Humans have a tendency to be critical rather than praising: we are trained as researchers to do this. Remember that in this case reviewers must talk about what works well as well as giving constructive feedback for improvement: begin with what works well and why before moving into what could be improved. Ending on a reaffirmation is often recommended too.

Being concrete and specific about what has worked well is important: group talk about exactly what we like gives pointers to improving writing. It has benefits beyond the emotional boost for the writer.

Writers can ask for specific areas to be given thought:

• Is the structure ok?
• Are you convinced by the X section?
• Is the Y section clear?
• Do I need to explain more about Z?
• Is this just too simplistic?
• Is this too obscure and hard to read?
• Do I sound authoritative in my use of theory?
• Could you watch for grammar or punctuation problems?
• Please suggest better words for any of my phrases.

As a reader follow the writer’s direction. You could also look for other stylistic qualities.

• Are there any times when the tone slips, for example, when language becomes too informal, or too stilted, or too obscure, or too naive?
• Are there any disjunctive colloquialisms? Any dead clichés? Or any words that you suspect may be problematic (e.g., ‘naturally’ if you are in a constructivist framework where nothing is assumed to be natural)?
• Is the tension right? Could the prose be tightened: is it too loose with many sentences yielding little of real value? Or is it too tight and dense to be understandable?
• Is the level of definition and explanation right? Are there any points when you need more explanation? Or are there places where there is too much spelt out so that this detracts from the flow of ideas?
• Are there repeats at word level or in sentence structure that would be better avoided?
• Are there any sentences that are too long and complex? If so, suggest a way of splitting giant mutant sentences into more than one.
• Are there times when emphasis seems inaccurate?
• Could you add any suggestions at times when ideas seem promising but not fully developed?

In peer review practice, I suggest that while staying aware of the emotional dimension reviewers should offer any suggestions that they believe would be helpful. Whenever a sentence is hard to follow, they should indicate this, and offer a way of clarifying it. It is so helpful when reviewers suggest how to restructure more logically, or find a more precise word, or ask questions that drive the author to see what is missing. The author has the option of rejecting suggestions, but will get something of value: a truthful view of their own work through another reader’s eyes.

That was where my criteria ended. As the group met for review over several sessions, we learned more about the mechanics of peer review.

This semester, several participants commented that it is really helpful getting feedback from someone who is not in their discipline.

A light came on for me when a reviewer said ‘I don’t know how to review this; the topic is so far out of my understanding,’ the biophysicist author helpfully suggested, ‘if you replace this big term with A and this one with B and this one with C, would it make sense to you?’ She’d articulated what I have found for years: if you ignore the content, and follow reading for logical progression, structure and grammar, you can give a great deal of useful feedback to writers without actually understanding the content fully.

In many ways this sort of feedback from someone who doesn’t understand is as important as feedback from insiders who do: the outsider reader is then reading the mechanics of language without being distracted by engagement with the content. Clarity is likely to result from a diligent unknowing reader. Another participant noticed that she really liked what she called experiential comment: times when someone said ‘at this point, I wondered why…’ or ‘here I am feeling that…’ and gave a real sense of the reader and their needs as they move through the writing.

The impetus generated by reviewing writing together is huge. One of the huge benefits of peer review is that it literalises the reader, someone who can slip out of focus if you are writing alone from a writerly perspective. In a writing group, the reader gives formative rather than summative feedback. It’s friendly. There’s sometimes laughter. Yet a lot is achieved too.

Several people in the group had significant breakthroughs with how to structure their work by talking through the difficulty they were having with sympathetic listeners hoping to help. In that group now, some of our time allows for problem talk and feedback. I suspect that in each case it wasn’t so much the feedback that caused the threshold crossing moment, but the act of explaining what was hard led the writer to solve their own problem.

 

 

 

 

Rash promises: Three lessons learned applicable to doctoral writing

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feedback on writing

By Susan Carter

Rash promises are made in good faith, but are often followed by regret when the time comes to deliver. I was reminded of this recently. I had offered ten postgraduate writers who were principally working on improving their writing that I would give each of them two hours feedback. My intention was to show them the benefit of another set of eyes to see how they might carry on their own revision. What was I thinking of?!

These people came from across campus, so spanned several epistemologies, those frames that quite drastically affect writing styles. It confirmed for me a few things I have written and taught about, driven home by long hours trying to give feedback that explained the meta-levels of establishing clarity.

What fulfilling my rash promise confirmed for me:

One: For hard science writing in particular you need a simple story behind the formula. Here are two simple stories:

1. W is a problem, especially in situation A, when B and C, the things that cause W, are exacerbated by Z.
2. To date, research has aimed at eliminating Z, but this is not possible in situations M and N.
3. So we are trying to defuse the effects of Z by making use of enzymes in the body that could reduce the B and C effects through function F.

Or

1. These systems produce trees that are captured in sequence to show drift in X. The ratio of drift can be factored into plans for modifying the systems.
2. However, in real life, the drift in X is dependent on how the individuals making decisions at level Q estimate how those working at levels R and S will interpret the system’s efficiency. The drift is influenced by individual expectation.
3. That means that the drift captured by the trees may be unreliable should those individuals change. Here I factor into the equation possible variants of Q estimates that allow a more precise understanding of what the drift implies into a sustainable future.

I could understand the writing—well, almost‑-if the big words were fed into a simple story—I couldn’t if the author focused only on the big words and left out the story.

The hard science authors were a little sceptical that this level of clarity amounted to much. They felt that someone in their discipline would be able to join the dots when facts were listed without the story explaining their relationship to each other as causality, or effect, or sequence. Yet I argue that even discipline-savvy readers will understand much more easily if they don’t have to do the cognitive work of dot-joining. The writer should do this for them to ensure they themselves have in fact got the story right. It is not uncommon for an aothor to become confused in the clusters of jargon, the big words.

Two: The need for a framework of argumentation applied equally in all disciplines. In my own writing, this is something I will often insert at the end. If I realise that I have become engrossed in detail (that often happens), I will insert (usually as topic sentences) how this detail supports the main argument. The framework ought not be boringly heavy-handed, but without it readers can lose energy in ploughing through pages of information that seems to have become detached from what is important about this chapter or article. About half of the group I was working with recognised that adding topic sentences to provide linkage greatly improved their writing.

Three: Readers other than the author notice writing tics. That is the main value of peer review of writing: you learn about your own habits as an author. The outside reader will grow irritated, or let’s just say they will spot overused abstract nouns like ‘complex issues.’ The author can then do a find search and replace some of them with more accurate words, noting that the term is a broad one that ripples with different nuances. Changing the big general term for the most accurate crispens the writing. When ‘we’ is used to mean both ‘we the research team conducting this research’ and ‘we, all researchers working in this field,’ and is also used too often, this also discombobulates readers.

And I learned something else—think twice before making rash promises. This time, though, I have enjoyed fulfilling one because, as usual, engaging with other academic’s writing taught me more about how it works.

Writing feedback from generic learning advisors compared to supervisors

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feedback on writing, learning advisor feedback, Supervisory feedback

By Susan Carter

I was talking to a doctoral student nearing the final stages of her thesis. She identifies as an older PhD student. She wished that her supervisors would stay focused on the thesis project rather than on the relationship and practice of supervision itself. Yes, they were both wonderful, but she wished that they would just make clear practical suggestions about writing—as I had just done from a generic advisor position, causing her evident relief and a mini-breakthrough.

She also suggested that mature students were maybe more interested in just getting the job done to their own satisfaction rather than beating metaphoric bushes–for example, the thickets of theory that might harbour other possible writing directions. Yet she suspected that supervisors saw it as good teaching to beat those bushes and send students chasing after the ideas that might emerge.

Her comments, her satisfaction with my focus on her writing, and our talk together about supervisors and how they work made me think about the differences between supervisory feedback on writing and feedback from others outside the supervision team. I’m proofing a book on generic doctoral support (i.e., not supervision) that has two chapters on support with writing.

Are there clear delineations between the levels (content, clarity, grammar, punctuation, style, structure etc.) on which supervisors give writing feedback compared to that from learning advisors? Or is it just a matter of the serendipity of who the supervisor and learning advisor are, how much time and interest they have in writing per se? And should we avoid interference in the happenstance of where support comes from?

Supervisors vary in their availability, and some very diligent supervisors simply lack the skills to talk clearly and constructively about writing (Paré, 2011). Learning advisors on the other hand are experts in writing at almost all levels, and talk that talk really well, but they may lack the discipline expertise that would let them work efficiently (Strauss, forthcoming), although it can be a great advantage too, in prompting students to explain things more clearly (Laurs, forthcoming).

My hunch is that you will have a stack of anecdotal evidence around this complex topic. Learning advisor support may be available but ignored by students who link using it with identifying themselves as not good enough, with generic learning support based on the deficit model.

That is a pity, because learning advisor support has much to offer that supplements supervisory support. Different learning cultures will mean different expectations (Wu, 2013), sometimes troublingly so (Fovotation, 2013)–a unsettlement that insiders often are unable to see, which makes it also isolating. Clusters of doctoral students who find structure or style problematic, or who happen to be grappling with the literature review, will benefit from working with others at the same point in the writing process. For that reason, support outside of supervision becomes an important scaffolding to student learning.

Sometimes learning support might provide encouragement and advice on the surface level with writing before it goes to the supervisor to doctoral students whose first language is not English, so that supervisors may then be able to view the content more clearly and comment more usefully (Carter, 2009). But sometimes it will be the supervisor who despairingly sends the student to a learning advisor after considerable frustrations. Supervisor frustration also leads to comments that demoralise students and cause them to lose confidence—and I believe that loss of confidence is a huge handicap. I find self-confidence to be important for my own writing (and actually almost everything else). It’s definitely a bad brain day when I lose it.

So often the borderlands between supervisory and learning advisorly feedback on writing are traversed by people who are having difficult times with writing. Yet some institutions don’t allow learning advisors to work closely with research students, and their limited availability bodes ill for those students who need more than a supervisor’s advice. In other instances, learning advisor engagement with doctoral writing means that they influence the thesis significantly, usually with resulting improvement in clarity.

Having worked as both supervisor and learning advisor, and having heard many anecdotes, I have my own ideas about this, but wonder what yours are. And the student who launched this conversation also asked whether discipline affected feedback on writing: I wonder if what I have to say is situated very squarely in learning to research under the qualitative banner?? Q.  Do the hierarchies that exist within science/ medicine paradigms expose differences of other kinds?

Carter, S. (2009). ‘Volunteer support of English as an additional language (EAL) doctoral students,’ International Journal of Doctoral Studies 4: 13–25.

Fotovatian, S. (2013). ‘Three constructs of institutional identity amongst international students in Australia,’ Teaching in Higher Education 17(5): 577–588.

Laurs, D. (forthcoming). ‘One-to-one generic support, in Developing Generic Support for Doctoral Students, pp 29-33eds. Carter, S. and Laurs, D. Oxon: Routledge.

Pare, A. (2011).‘Speaking of writing: supervisory feedback and the dissertation’ in L. McAlpine and C. Amundsen (eds) Doctoral Education: Research-Based Strategies for Doctoral Students, Supervisors and Administrators, Dordrecht: Springer, 59–74.

Strauss, P. (in press). ‘”I don’t think we’re seen as a nuisance” – the positioning of postgraduate Learning Advisors in New Zealand universities.’ TEXT Journal of Writing and Writing Courses.

Wu, S. (2013). ‘Filling the pot or lighting the fire: cultural variations in conceptions of pedagogy,’ Teaching in Higher Education 7(4): 387–895.