Another year and do we understand doctoral writing any better?

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End-of-year greetings, feedback on writing, online writing group, Supervising online, Writing tips

 

For many of us in English speaking countries, the end of the year means heading into seasonal holidays when we gather together with family and friends, share meals, drinks, Christmas pies and side-step the pressure of work. Lockdowns and anxiety might have both limited this activity and made it even more emotional when there are chances to get together and celebrate just that—time spent together.

Photo by Askar Abayev from Pexels

This year we’re issuing a challenge: what have you learned this year about doctoral writing? The pandemic has forced us to learn new tricks, mostly with working at a distance to support doctoral writing, a topic that Cally considered last year. We thought we’d end 2021 by reflecting on what we’ve learned.

International Doctoral Education Research Network (IDERN) Online Meeting, 26 Aug 2020

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COVID 19, IDERN, online conference, online writing group, Supervising online, writing online

By Cally Guerin

One activity of the DoctoralWriting blog is to report on conferences and events we’ve attended. Of course, this year that has been hugely disrupted: most of us have seen our favourite meetings cancelled and have consequently missed out on the interactions with our research community that are usually a source of inspiration and encouragement. Luckily, online alternatives are appearing to fill that gap.

On 26 August, the first online meeting was convened for IDERN, the International Doctoral Education Research Network (this group had previously planned to meet in Denmark in June 2020). The topic was “Distance supervision and its discontents: what do we need to understand?”, facilitated by Gina Wisker (University of Bath), Swapna Kumar (University of Florida) and me (Australian National University). We had about 60 attendees from 17 different countries around the world.

Any discussion of supervision inevitably touches upon issues around doctoral writing, and this meeting was the same, even though writing wasn’t our specific focus. The sudden shift to online supervision in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic has meant that many supervisors have been forced into developing different practices for working on writing with doctoral candidates.

The Year of Wonders: Doctoral writing in the time of COVID-19

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isolation, online writing group

By Cally Guerin

My title comes from my current reading – Geraldine Brooks’s Year of Wonders, set during the Great Plague of 1666, and Gabriel García Márquez’s Love in the Time of Cholera (I also recommend Minette Walters’ The Last Hours for a good read on strong women taking the lead on self-isolation). These really are times when academics and doctoral writers need to protect themselves from the world pandemic. As universities around the world close campuses and move teaching online, doctoral writers are facing even more challenges than usual. What used to feel like a bit of a luxury when only occasionally possible, working from home is now mandatory for many of us. This post looks at how doctoral writers can be supported to stay on track in the current state of confinement.

Preparing for AcWriMo 2019

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AcWriMo, online writing group

By Cally Guerin

November is Academic Writing Month (AcWriMo) – the perfect time to get some writing done before the end of the year. Inspired by Kay Guccione’s WriteFest at Sheffield University over the last few years, I’m trying out some extra events in my new role at ANU. I’ve reported previously on my experiments with AcWriMo, and am keen to keep refining the process. Things have moved on a bit since my first attempt in 2013, but the core concept remains the same.

Just do it!! (and delete the ‘publish or perish’ warning)

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AcWriMo, online writing group, publish or perish, writing boot camp, writing retreat

By Cally Guerin

I was talking to PhD students recently about how they can’t afford to be precious about their writing – that they need to simply see it as something they do as part of their job (or what Aitchison & Lee call the ‘normal business’ of academic life). After the workshop, one of the participants (thanks, Steph!) sent me a comic that she has pinned onto her noticeboard. In it, an academic is explaining that, in academia, we have a saying ‘publish or perish!’. The other person, who is not an academic, responds matter-of-factly: ‘Yeah, we have that too. It’s called “Do your job or get fired”.’

It’s a harsh message, and one that I would be careful of endorsing without reservation. I am fully aware that some academics’ working lives are well set up to allow them to get on with their research and to publish it, while others have such heavy teaching and administration loads that their research output drops off. Nevertheless, anyone enrolled in a PhD does need to get the writing done, and many also want to see their work published. If they are to succeed in these tasks, I think it is very important to discourage two fairly common attitudes towards doctoral writing: firstly, that writing is somehow special and more difficult than other elements of research; and secondly, that writing requires all sorts of particular conditions before one can get down to the work.

I can’t find the reference despite hours of searching, but someone somewhere talked about a writer (was it Asimov?) whose routine preparation for writing was to “Sit down at my desk within reach of the keyboard, hold my hands over the keyboard, and start typing”. I think this is an excellent way to approach the task. (Please let me know if you have any kind of reference or verification for this attribution – I’d prefer to be a bit more scholarly about it!)

We’ve talked in other posts about establishing good writing habits that help us get on with the job (see, for example, New Year resolution: Get the right/write habit), and clarified that really means ‘good for you’. What works for one person’s life context and commitments is not necessarily the answer for someone else. Rising at 5am to write for three hours before breakfast is ideal for some, but not if you are unable to get to bed early or will be met by a crying baby at 5:30am; large quantities of amphetamines might have aided Jean-Paul Sartre, but this technique is unlikely to be sustainable for most of us.

Increasingly, academic writers are taking a disciplined stand, forming various kinds of writing groups and writing to order. Recalcitrant PhD students – and those who simply want to make some speedy writing progress – are joining ‘boot camps’ (see, for example, University of Melbourne and RMIT), where they are focussed on writing as much as possible during set writing periods. This is a model that is based on more peaceful writing retreats (see, for example, the models developed by Barbara Grant and Rowena Murray. Others are taking advantage of the Shut up and Write! movement, while yet more are signing up for Academic Writing Month (AcWriMo). These are all useful ways of getting on with the job of writing as an everyday practice. What I like most of all is that these approaches are pushing along thesis writing, whether that is in a traditional format or as a thesis by publication.

But if one more person mouths the tired cliché ‘publish or perish’ at me, I might well scream. The situation is obviously far more complicated than that simple dichotomy announces, and there are all sorts of reasons one ought to avoid publishing research prematurely (Paré, 2010). So the challenge I’d like to put to you readers is to devise an alternative motto to take its place. Any votes for the new slogan for doctoral writers that needs to replace this? ‘Write it or regret it’, ‘Write for your life’, ‘Stay calm and write’?

Aitchison, C. & Lee, A. (2006). Research writing: problems and pedagogies, Teaching in Higher Education, 11(3): 265-278.

Paré, A. (2010). Slow the presses: concerns about premature publication. In C. Aitchison, B. Kamler & A. Lee (Eds), Publishing Pedagogies for the Doctorate and Beyond, London, UK: Routledge.

Experimenting with Academic Writing Month (AcWriMo)

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AcWriMo, doctoral community, online writing group

by Cally Guerin

At Adelaide University we have just tried our first experiment with Academic Writing Month (AcWriMo). Inspired by National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), Charlotte Frost developed an academic version of this concept a couple of years ago that has grown and grown since then. Despite the feeling that the word AcWriMo sounds like it might turn into ‘acrimonious’, the exact opposite is true. I know that some academics have expressed reservations about the concept of AcWriMo, but I decided to give it a go anyway.

As an academic developer running programs for research students, I wanted AcWriMo to achieve several different things for participants at my university. Mostly, I hoped that this experiment would:

1. encourage more writing;
2. build a sense of community; and
3. provide a form of online writing group for those who can’t (or don’t want to) attend face-to-face sessions.

Of course, there were some teething problems. Originally I had planned to use Facebook for the community discussions, as other academics tell me they’ve had good success with engaging students in the space they already occupy. Perhaps that’s true for undergrads, but in the end I chose not to use Facebook after several students told me they prefer to keep it for purely private social interactions and/or had previously had bad experiences with too much information being ‘shared’ by others on Facebook. So we ended up using Wikispaces for the community discussions—partly because it’s free, and partly because it is really easy to use.

Quite a bit of the early correspondence to set up AcWriMo took place via the (supposedly outdated but really quite convenient) email system. This is probably because my initial email inviting all research students to participate was sent out through the university-wide email list. I’m of the generation that likes email, but the participants don’t seem to mind such an old-fashioned approach, especially since it is our university’s usual form of communication.

Then we used Dropbox to house a register of names, writing goals, and to tally each day’s writing achievements. I had tried out a couple of alternatives for the register, including Google Docs with spreadsheets, but any free versions seemed clumsy and hard to manage. Dropbox, in contrast, is good for Word documents, and it’s free. There were a few problems in terms of students receiving the right link, but one of the participants worked out what I was doing wrong. In the meantime, another resourceful participant had created a basic, editable table in Wikispaces, and many others have chosen to stick with this as their main place for recording daily output. One of the great advantages of working with clever, resourceful doctoral candidates is that they are very good at solving problems (thank you both!). Having all the information in one place is a better way to go and next time we will use just the Wikispaces site.

Participants set writing targets ranging from 100 to 500 words per day. Any kind of target is fine—the key is making a public commitment and then feeling an obligation to follow through. As a role model for my first group I wasn’t always quite as productive as I’d hoped, and several others commented on the Discussion Board that they’d had unexpected interruptions during the month too. Many, however, exceeded their promised word count, and I for one found myself trying to write just one more sentence so that I could meet my obligations.

Did I get all three of my pre-Christmas wishes? Yep, I think so. Thousands of words have been written during this concentrated effort; maybe they would have been written anyway, but this way there is a record of the achievement. There is certainly a sense of a community developing, with a few key contributors to the Discussion Board but no doubt plenty of others reading and lurking in the background—they are all busy adding to their daily scores, even if not responding directly to my discussion prompts. Already some have asked if they have to finish at the end of November, or can we continue to have the Wikispace (the answer is a resounding yes!). And finally, most of the names on the register are not people I’ve come across in the other writing groups and workshops I run for research students, so AcWriMo seems to have reached out to a different group from our other offerings.

Overall, as a lead-up to the end of both the calendar year and the academic year in Australia, this has been an invigorating experience. I’m already planning to do it again in 2014, and hope some of this year’s participants are keen to try again—unless, of course, they’ve established such good writing habits this month that they complete their theses before then!

Have you ever been involved in AcWriMo? If so, I’d love to hear about your experiences, both positive and negative, and any tips you have for making the most of it.