Revision: Turning literature review lists into logical argument

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argumentation, Precision, structuring argument, supervisor feedback

By Lawrence Zhang and Susan Carter

Professor Lawrence Zhang is a much sought after supervisor at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, who takes a large number of mainly Chinese doctoral students through to successful completion and employment following that. One comment of his on a student’s oral presentation seemed so helpful and of use to many other students that it triggered this post.

The oral presentation was for the committee who were reviewing at the end of the provisional first year. They worked within the discipline but not within the particular field.

Reviewing the candidate’s PowerPoint, Lawrence wrote in an email:

You have listed all the authors, and this is not as good as what research has been done. Can you list all the challenges that are pointed out by these scholars instead of just name-listing? Your purpose of citing these authors and critically appraising their work is to argue for the validity of your study, especially showing any possible research gap that you intend to fill. In a way, that will be how you will be regarded as making contributions to the existing literature. It is not only about the presentation per se, but instead it is really about the Introduction of the thesis where you have to really spend time presenting your argument systematically and coherently on the basis of what you have briefly reviewed about “the state-of-the-art” in the field on this particular topic or subject. It is not about piling up all the names to impress your reader or your audience, who are more keen to know what these authors have done in terms of how that relates to what you will be doing.

Achieving writing precision: applying simple activities to complex thesis writing

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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.

The 4-sentence research proposal

Tags

Precision, Writing as social identity; the reader as significant other

By Amanda Wolf
Amanda Wolf is Deputy Head of the School of Government at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand

Like many of us, I was taught that research starts with a research question. The more generous texts and supervisors may quietly soften that imperative with a whispered confidence that it is permissible to amend the research question—many times if need be—before speaking the final gem aloud. But, not ‘having a research question’ too often can debilitate students, who conclude that they are not yet started on their research.

Over the years, I have instructed students in a simple technique to bypass the no-question-yet paralysis, and thereby allow the question to pop out. The heart of the technique is to name both curiosity and purpose succinctly, in four steps.

Voice and emphasis in doctoral writing

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Accurate word choice, Precision, Writing as social identity; the reader as significant other

By Susan Carter

Here’s a speculation: too much writerly focus on discipline convention sometimes muffles the value of the argument and the authorial voice. I’m prompted by three separate experiences. Two were wrapped around giving feedback on writing.

Bert’s a longstanding personal friend who is also currently a doctoral student: we worked together decades ago before university became a part of our lives and were surprised to find each other both locked into academia. Because I know Bert well, I know that he is passionate about inclusive teaching, and I could see that his authentic concern with getting at-risk students safely through their first year at university would have been the foundation for his PhD topic. Yet he was struggling with writing, stuck, getting hammered a bit by his supervisors, and I became an informal mentor.

What I noticed straight way as I read his chapter draft was that he avoided making statements about his own belief: there was no sense of a live author with a set of pedagogical values evident in his discussion section. In Education, there needed to be, and even more so in this case. As a friend, I felt indignant that Bert’s commitment to what he saw as academic style (objective, muted in tone) was betraying who he was, the caring teacher–and one also, at this point in time, a caring teacher under pressure to wrap up his PhD.

Then another colleague who is in the early stages of her doctorate showed me two sections of her writing. One was written on the basis of an initial review of literature. The other was written on the basis of her own ideas. The ideas-prompted one was much more logical in its flow, more animated and convincing, with a stronger sense that she was an experienced trustworthy author.

Comparison made me wonder whether maybe it is sounder to begin from the spark of ideas and feed literature references into the prose than it is to privilege the literature as the starting point.

I suspect that most experienced academic writers follow this practice, and it may be a point of difference between experienced research writers and those who are new to the task, new to the extensive literature search and daunted by academic conventions. Of course, initially candidates need to read extensively to check there is a gap in knowledge to be filled, and to tentatively write about what they read, but once writing starts in earnest, I believe that prose driven by ideas is usually stronger.

When candidates step up to research writing at a higher level than they have experienced before, it can seem daunting trying to meet discipline conventions and reader expectations. But, certainly in some disciplines, a good legend above the desk might be ‘Trust yourself: Your research value lies more in your ability to think and connect than in your ability to hobble prose to academic conventions.’

There is also the issue of getting the balance of emphasis just right. The third thing prompting this post was an article in a recent Listener on good communication. It gave examples of workplace behaviour that would require people to initiate difficult conversations, and then compared three approaches to demonstrate good and bad practice.

Essentially, the speaker needed to broach a conflict of interests; the skilled initiator should aim to avoid an angry argument, and nor should they be so polite that they fail to state their concern effectively. In the Listener article, the children’s version of Goldilocks and the Three Bears provided the analogy for approaches that, like Goldilock’s experience of the three bears’ different beds, were too hard, too soft and just right. Some statements were too harsh, some were too gentle, so ineffective, and then there was the carefully worded just right version.

I think often doctoral writing manoeuvres through the same challenges with saying things exactly right for the amount of emphasis that will neither antagonise a reader because too strongly stated, nor be so hedged as to fail to make a contribution.

Sometimes writing is less clear when it strives to capture academic language, for example, when the passive voice is striven to be maintained, clarity may be lost–I’m spoofing the passive here to demonstrate. I’m not sure what to suggest in such cases, and wonder if others have practical ways of talking students through to where they find their own voice, and capture the right emphasis on their own ideas.

Review before submission: an index-building model for multiple audience theses

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argumentation, Precision, Writing as social identity; the reader as significant other

By Susan Carter
This post applies a book index-building experience to doctoral writing with multiple audiences. You do not need an index in a doctoral thesis. I am not by any means suggesting this as an exercise before submission: it is a big time consumer, but I will suggest the possible usefulness of a truncated version.

Some doctoral students have two distinct audiences beyond the examiners. This may be true of those taking an indigenous, feminist or queer theoretical position, or showing that one group of people (nurses in the ward, or teachers in small rural towns, say) need more support in some area or that they are undervalued. Research like this often creates new knowledge that underscores the need for support for a particular course of action. The authors of such theses may be aware that have some sympathetic readers—insiders who will welcome the research on a topic of concern to them–and others who are sceptical. Thus they need to direct their argument in two different directions at once to influence the progress of their cause.

I learned a new way of seeing when I co-edited a book about generic support for doctoral students. The book’s structure was unusual: in addition to the introduction and conclusion to the book, we editors also wrote introductions to each chapter and some sections within the chapters. Our joint coherent argument was built through a bricolage of other voices, with about thirty-five others giving us short inset pieces we fitted into our own frame. Most of the book’s expected readers would be sympathetic: other learning advisors providing generic support to doctoral candidates and seeking inspiration. However, our argument really hoped to persuade the unconverted of the value of our practice and pedagogy. These readers include a middle group of academics whose supervisory work meshes with generic support, doctoral students who sometimes don’t realise how useful generic workshops would be for them and, most of all, senior management who so frequently engage in a program of change management that entails restructuring generic programmes. We felt this last group might very well be sceptics.

Now, to build an abstract index, i.e, one that indexes ideas and not just single words, you work through your list of terms to be indexed and find-search in your large document, checking each instance recording how long its discussion runs. This gives a quantitative overview of how many pages are devoted to the themes and factors that build the overall argument, the thesis. The process showed us how often we talked about good practice in terms that learning advisors would recognise, and how often in terms likely to speak to senior management. For example, the index included:
1. Terms for the sympathetic: academic identity formation, critical thinking skills, culture, equity, graduate attributes, homeliness, indigenous, insider/outsider, theory, thesis-writing
2. Terms that talked to those neutral folk we complement and work with: collaboration, communities of practice, intercultural skills, supervision, university context
3. Terms intended to persuade senior management: accountability, assessment, benchmarking, completion of doctorate, curriculum, effectiveness, employability, publication, key performance indicators.
The index-building process surprised me with a new view of a document that I had gone through diligently so many times.

I had worried we might be biased towards our sympathetic reader, or too didactic overall, soapbox thumping about what matters to us. Instead I found that we were fairly even-handed in the attention we gave the different audiences as instanced by our interweaving of different stakeholder discourses. In effect the search for terms let me gauge how appropriately and successfully we were in driving one argument forward that was differently nuanced for different readers. I could see that it was a way to pick up any lack of balance.

Many doctoral students are similarly motivated by the desire to articulate the value of their work to sympathetic insiders who know that a cause really matters, and to persuade the unconverted. This method could be modified when scholars/candidates/ students have a near-completed thesis: they could make a short list of the most significant themes and associated terminologies and then do a find-search for each thus enabling them to build a map of usage. When this task is undertaken as though constructing an abstract index, it means checking the text surrounding the term to decide how much attention is given to the concept. This kind of quantification shows how the overall argument weighs out in terms of speaking to different target audiences.

I’m hoping you might have other suggestions for doctoral students in the last few months before submission. What other ways are there to audit the structure and the weight of argument throughout the entire thesis? And what else needs checking when different research methods are used?

Saying ‘says’ in research writing

Tags

Accurate word choice, Precision

By Susan Carter

Academics tend to agree that, all else being equal, a simple word is better than a pedantic one. There’s one curious exception: we all know to avoid saying ‘says’ in academic writing.

Words that say ‘says’ without saying the actual four-letter word convey a complex signaling system. Careful choice of ‘says’ words shows critical evaluation of the literature—it is the literature that usually does the saying in research writing.

I once heard a doctoral student say that their supervisor told them to always use ‘suggests.’ The student believed it was a discipline preference relating to an objective voice–I think it was simply bad advice.

For all disciplines need to show critical analysis: ‘suggests’ is simply the wrong word in some cases. Maybe the supervisor didn’t trust this person to signal correctly in their choice of options and thought ‘suggests’ was a pretty safe default position. Yet, encouraging students to think about the degrees of difference in what those ‘says’ words convey is one way to explicitly show them how to achieve more accurate and nuanced academic writing.

‘Suggests,’ is neutral, a tad on the tentative side. A suggestion doesn’t stridently take a stance. So although ‘suggests’ seems harmless, it won’t be the most accurate word if the author actually was really emphatic. If an examiner wants sound evidence of critical interpretation, ‘suggests’ often won’t give that.

Gathering ‘says’ words into a list shows more clearly the nuances of meaning between them. ‘Says’ words can be collected up by individuals or as a group exercise. Then they can be put together for ones that might be used in similar situations. This includes, for example, when an author

• really is tentative or explorative;
• endorses someone else;
• disagrees with someone else;
• picks something apart to show better how it works;
• pulls things together in new ways; or
• takes things further.

I’ve drawn up a list of some of these words, and put them into clusters. At the shallow end of the pool: ‘explores,’ ‘speculates,’ ‘suggests,’ ‘proposes,’ ‘finds,’ and ‘shows.’

There are also ‘describes,’ ‘clarifies,’ explains’ or ‘unpacks’ for the times when authors make things clearer.

They may ‘theorise,’ ‘refine,’ or calibrate.’ With just a little more force, it might become ‘asserts,’ ‘endorses,’ ‘demonstrates,’ ‘affirms.

An author may ‘emphasise’ or they may actually ‘argue.’

When an author wants to say that those they are citing came across something really very new, the cited author can be said to ‘discover’ or ‘find’. And there are two uses of ‘finds:’ the literal one when something is actually found that was missing before; and the metaphorical one to mean when a position about previously know things has been found and taken by this individual thinker.

When an author makes headway by clearing aside misconceptions, they may ‘doubt,’ ‘refute,’ ‘rebuff,’ ‘challenge,’ ‘dispute,’ ‘disprove,’ or, more graphically, ‘explode the myth/misconception/belief.’

Or they may follow someone else’s lead but continue the vector further, as when they ‘add,’ ‘expand,’ ‘develop,’ or ‘take further.’ Sometimes they ‘synthesise’ by pulling different discourses together.

When a research writer says an author ‘reveals,’ ‘illuminates,’ ‘dissects,’ ‘explicates,’ ‘develops,’ or ‘anatomises,’ they are also saying that they found that work helpful, and learned from it. They are endorsing the author they are citing, and aligning their own work with it. My own favourite, my highest praise for a cited author, is ‘anatomise,’ because it conjures up the cutting open to show how things work inside. Rembrandt’s Dr Tulp with his solemn anatomy lesson springs to mind.

Any other ‘says’ words, or comments on this curious social phenomena?