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DoctoralWriting SIG

Tag Archives: Researcher identity

Helpful videos: Doctoral writing as thinking

27 Monday Feb 2023

Posted by doctoralwriting in 2. Grammar/Voice/Style

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Doctoral writing, Precision, Researcher identity, writing skills development

By Susan Carter drawing on Cecile Badenhorst

Cecile Badenhorst MA (UBC), PhD (Queen’s) is a Professor in the Adult Education/Post-Secondary program in the Faculty of Education at Memorial University in Canada.  Her research interests are post-secondary and adult learning experiences particularly graduate research writing and academic literacies.  She has written three books in this area:  Research Writing (2007), Dissertation Writing (2008) and Productive Writing (2010). She has also co-edited with Cally Guerin, Research literacies and writing pedagogies for masters and doctoral writers (2016); and with Britt Amell & Jamie Burford Re-imagining doctoral writing (2021) which is available via open access: https://wac.colostate.edu/books/international/doctoral/

The value of videos

While I have long appreciated Cecile Badenhorst’s publications as her interests overlay my own, only recently have I found the rich trove of videos that she has given to the world. I am keen to share these gems with the DoctoralWriting community over the next few posts. There will be four posts in total: this one focusing on doctoral writing as thinking will be followed by one on some of the pragmatic factors of doctoral writing (for example, fluency, structuring, plagiarism avoidance), then one on different genres (article, conference abstract and presentation, different thesis chapters), and finally a post relating to literature review.

Why my excitement? Continue reading →

Doctoral writing 2023: Where’s this year heading?

09 Thursday Feb 2023

Posted by doctoralwriting in 3. Writing Practices

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Desire to write, Emotion & writing, Researcher identity, Staying realistic with writing

By Susan Carter

Somehow we’re in February and what was a nice new year to be celebrated a few weeks ago has cranked up into taking itself seriously and we are back at work in the wilds of doctoral pedagogy.

For many of us, that means we are back thinking of different ways to support doctoral writing strongly, so that authors can both crack through obstacles to doing it—Paul Silvia is a help with this—and clearly see what examiners are looking for and how the weird genre of the doctoral thesis works.

Claire, Cally and I would like to begin this year with an invitation by asking readers who routinely provide writing workshops for doctoral writers to consider offering this blog a post in 2023.

Make that asking you, dear reader….If you facilitate writing workshops for undergraduates, for academics, or for creative writers and can see how your session design could be adapted, we’d welcome new approaches. If you have advice or exercises you have developed as a supervisor, you could also consider sharing them. And if you are a candidate with insights into doctoral writing that you think are both fairly novel and distinctly useful, here’s an opportunity to contribute to colleagues. You could email us here with a rough idea for a post to kick it off.

You might find stimulation for thinking about doctoral writing practices amongst the doctoral writing discussions that Juliet Lum and Susan Mowbray coordinate—these occur live, and then Juliet and Susan report on what was covered. Towards the end of 2022 topics including how to see writing as healing, and how supervisors and academic developers can work together to support doctoral writing. The discussions have the vitality of a community with shared interests yarning together, taking a topic from different points of view and sharing experiences. That ability to share interests, empathy and strategies makes this blog and these conversations worth continuing into this new year.

Moving along from an invitation to publish a post with us, I’d like to post a provocation prompted by the last few traumatic years of a pandemic with subsequent lockdown and climate extremes that have devastated some regions and disrupted lives. There’s some good empirical evidence of this (e.g., Byron, 2020; Bukko & Dhesi, 2021; Levine et al., 2021), besides the videos on the news.

So yes, this is a newish year, but many of us feel less secure than we might have done a few years ago. It seems unrealistic to ignore what is happening outside of academia when much is so intrusive as to affect what happens within it.

So what do you think about this: Should the academic community encourage doctoral writers to include mentioning any external trauma that has affected their research in the same way that they would if experiments failed, or data proved unexpectedly impossible to get? Are some external disruptions as legitimate an aspect of doctoral research as internal disruption? Is how doctoral researchers handled such disruptions a vital part of demonstrating their development into independent researcher professionalism? Does this relate to discipline, with HASS more likely than STEM to see the epistemological relevance of contextualising research within the experience of doing it?

I’d like to do more on this on this blog, and I am wondering if there’s a research project on the issue of writing about personal trauma affecting research experience. Could we start a discussion on how that writing could be framed, and where in the thesis it might go, so that academic integrity is maintained? Susan would be pleased if you sent her an email with your thoughts on writing in the thesis about the impact of the pandemic or climate change on research experience and then if there’s interest, she will assemble ideas into a post to follow this one.

Meanwhile, over the break Cally, Claire and I have been putting together another book, this one a guide to editing a journal special issue or a monograph with chapters from different authors. It’s for a great Routledge series edited by Pat Thomson and Helen Kara that is aimed at early career academics perhaps including doctoral candidates and especially new graduates seeking an academic career: Insider guides to success in academia. These are little books where authors with experience offer suggestions that they hope will be helpful for those taking on work they haven’t done before. You may find something of interest amongst them.

For us, it took us back into the sharp reality of academic writing: producing academic writing to a deadline, writing in a slightly different genre than usual, and doing this over the summer break. Admittedly, it’s been a stormy summer down here in the Southern Hemisphere, rather denying the idyll of sunshine, beach, outdoor walks, so urgency at the computer has seemed appropriate. But thinking about how to keep at writing for longer than is quite comfortable, how to savour what works well while staying alert to what needs more clarity, and how to write within the genre is now alive in our minds. Sometimes the gap between experienced academics and doctoral novices is not too huge.  

References

Byrom, N. (2020). COVID-19 and the research community: The challenges of lockdown for early-career researchers. eLife , no page numbers. https://elifesciences.org/articles/59634

Bukko, D. & Dhesi, J. (2021). Doctoral students living, leading and learning during a pandemic. Impacting Education: Journal on Transforming Professional Practice, 6(2), 25-33. 

Levine, F. J., Nasire, N.S., Rios-aguilar, C., Gildersleeve, R. E., Rosich, K. J., Bang, M., Bell, N.E., & Holsapple, M. A. (2021). Voices from the field: The impact of COVID-19 on early career scholars and doctoral students (Focus Group Study Report). American Educational Research Association: Spencer Foundation. https://doi.org/10.3102/aera20211

Doctoral writing as self-transcendence?

25 Tuesday Jan 2022

Posted by doctoralwriting in 5. Identity & Emotion

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Emotion & writing, Researcher identity, Writing motivation

By Susan Carter

It’s the start of another new year, and this first post dares to be absurdly positive given how tough the last few years have been for doctoral writers and those who support them during full or partial COVID isolation.

The cheerful New Year’s message here is that doctoral writing is an act of self-transcendence. That it offers a way forward, a portal to other dimensions and a ladder to unknown heights with both dangers to confront and goods to be won. It’s tempting to draw on classical heroes and their tales as similar to the doctoral journey–(or to go downmarket with the many children’s stories that feature threat, fear and ultimate reward, like Jack and the Beanstalk).

The start of a new year offers the time when we turn to making our lives more purposeful. The thoughts in this post could be used as provocations in a doctoral writing retreat or workshop.

Continue reading →

Best 8 of 8 years of thoughts about doctoral writing

07 Monday Sep 2020

Posted by doctoralwriting in 6. Community Reports

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Doctoral writing, literature review, Researcher identity, Writing as social identity; the reader as significant other, writing skills development

by Susan Carter, Cally Guerin and Claire Aitchison

It’s now the 8th anniversary of the first DoctoralWriting SIG post. To celebrate this with a quietness that befits doctoral writing in the time of Covid 19, we’ve chosen what could be regarded as the eight top posts, with links to these posts so that you can view them if you haven’t already. That slyly evasive passive verb ‘could be regarded’ of the last sentence is deliberate: it was a tough job choosing 8 bests from 344 posts, and other options would be equally defensible. So, although we have numbered these to ensure there really are 8, the order has no significance whatsoever.

First criteria for our choice was most viewed. Views give an inkling of what people in the doctoral writing community are looking for. We think that this signals more than just how cunningly baited the click bait was, and points instead to topics that are troublesome or that matter to doctoral writers and those who support them. We began the best eight with the three most viewed posts. The most viewed by far and away (209, 377 views) was, surprisingly … [DRUMROLL] Continue reading →

Voice in thesis writing – why does it continue to engage us?

23 Tuesday Jun 2020

Posted by doctoralwriting in 2. Grammar/Voice/Style

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authorial voice, Researcher identity, Voice in thesis writing

Claire Aitchison

So much has been written about voice in research and thesis writing and yet it continues to be a perennial concern amongst bloggers, writing teachers and researchers. In a recent supervisory discussion, I was reminded again of just how contentious this issue can be.

Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash

What is voice?

Some people consider voice simply in terms of rhetorical and linguistic devices, but for me, it is SO much more.

I think of ‘voice’ as the sense of the author conveyed, intentionally or otherwise, through a host of interacting features including affect, tone, style, self-revelation and involving complex issues of identity, intent, and academic and disciplinary practice. In other words, I regard voice as a social practice of identity making. In this, I am heavily influenced by the work of Ros Ivanič (1998) who sees voice in relationship to an author’s struggles with authority, self-representation and personal history. For doctoral writers and their practices, these struggles are in direct relationship with questions of the ‘autobiographical self’ (the writer’s life-history, the motivations driving their research scholarship), the ‘self as author’ (i.e., the authorial self, the authority they bring to their writing) and the ‘discoursal self’ (a writer’s representation of self).  Some of this identity formation through writing is conscious and some unconscious, sometimes it is conflictual, and it is always contextual – influenced by the norms and practices of the discipline, the methodological approach, the topic itself, the impending examination, and perhaps even the preferences and predilections of the supervisor! Continue reading →

Social aspects of doctoral writing, courtesy of Marmalade the rabbit

23 Monday Mar 2020

Posted by doctoralwriting in 3. Writing Practices

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

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

By Susan Carter

You probably don’t pay much attention to the image we have as our banner branding the DoctoralWriting SIG blog. Take a look at it now—there’s a hand at the keyboard of a computer, and it holds a ballpoint between two fingers telling of work on both hard and soft copies and thinking across both. Over to one side there’s the top of a notebook and a document held together with a binder clip, evidence of all the reading and interconnection of texts that sit behind academic writing.

That’s a pretty neat image for a blog on doctoral writing, right? But what you do not know about is the back story to this image, a story that contains a rabbit. This post discusses why the rabbit is missing as an analogy to what you might leave in or take out of doctoral writing. Continue reading →

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