Voice in doctoral writing: what is it? and can it be taught?

Tags

English language writing skills, Researcher identity, Writing as social identity; the reader as significant other

By Susan Carter

This post reports on a workshop that proved illuminating, leading me to think that closer investigation of voice could be a research project for the future. Are the doctoral students you know conscious of developing their own voices in their writing, or still experimenting to find it, or a bit confused as to what voice actually is? And is this something that as supervisors we are certain about ourselves and can give support for?

It’s not over until it’s over: writing a doctoral graduation citation

Tags

graduation citation, Researcher identity

Today’s guest bloggers, Ana María Benton and Ian Brailsford, write to us from New Zealand. Ana María Benton holds a doctoral degree in education and is a language learning adviser within English Language Enrichment  (Libraries and Learning Services: Te Tumu Herenga) at the University of Auckland. She has long worked with university students and is passionate about language planning, second language education, and language revitalization. Ian Brailsford is an assistant with the University of Auckland’s Specials Collections (Libraries and Learning Services: Te Tumu Herenga) and was previously employed as a postgraduate learning adviser working primarily with doctoral candidates. Here they explain the identity work involved in writing the citation that is read out at New Zealand graduation ceremonies for PhD candidates.

By Drs Ana Maria Benton Zavala and Ian Brailsford

Introduction

This blog post describes the final piece of doctoral writing for a recently awarded PhD: the brief citation read out at graduation. Conventional wisdom is that the thesis abstract is the final (and possibly hardest) piece of writing. At our University, the official guidelines stipulate that abstracts be no more than 350 words. This equates to approximately three to four years’ full-time doctoral study honed down to three to four paragraphs. Good advice on writing the abstract is out there; this post attempts the same for a citation.

Designing a new doctoral research project and factoring in writing

Tags

Desire to write, Doctoral writing, Precision, Researcher identity

By Susan Carter

This afternoon I am meeting a new doctoral candidate I’ll be supervising, and I’ve already sent her a set of questions in advance of meeting. Before we begin working as a team with the other supervisor to design the doctoral project and start writing seriously, I want the candidate to do some thinking. Mostly, it’s she who must ensure that we do not get side-tracked by talk of methods, methodology, and theory from focussing on what is central: the candidate as someone already with a life that we want this doctorate to improve.

I’ve drawn these questions up, and filed them away knowing that this will be another useful document for sharing with other academics and using again myself.

Acknowledgements in a doctoral thesis: Humanising the examination process?

Tags

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

By Dr Vijay Kumar

University of Otago, New Zealand.

Dr Vijay Kumar is a leading figure in the research field of doctoral education, experience and pedagogy. He applies linguistics methodologies to considering doctoral writing and the relationship between candidate-author and supervisor-reviewer as to how feedback on writing works best. He offers his reflection on the acknowledgements, and the results of his research on whether or not acknowledgments influence examiners–do click on the link to his interesting article.

I am beginning to get the notion that acknowledgments humanise the examination process.

One of the first sections I read when I get a thesis to examine is the acknowledgments.  I want to know the person who wrote the thesis and the journey the candidate had to go through to submit this work for examination. At times, I am affected when the candidate writes about their struggles – leaving family behind to pursue their dreams, death of loved ones, hardship while doing the PhD and also the time it took for them to submit as this may reflect financial hardship. I become extremely sympathetic reading about parents who have to balance the PhD and care for children during the journey – these struggles speak to the human side of an examiner and I expect other examiners to be the same.

Managing supervisor/candidate falling out over doctoral writing

Tags

Emotion & writing, Feedback practices, Researcher identity, supervisor feedback, Writing as social identity; the reader as significant other

By Susan Carter

It’s common for supervisory relations to grow tense somewhere during a doctorate. It’s also usual for the parties involved to work through such tension, and move on, that very usual process in most human relationships. Now and then, though, emotions grow intense, and the disagreement between candidate and supervisor threatens to obstruct the doctorate. And while some tensions may emerge from differing personalities, some relate to differences in writing processes or style preferences. A few times I have worked with supervisor/candidate couples in strife, and this post describes my suggestions for managing discord.

Scholarship as collaboration: Towards a generous rhetoric

Tags

Emotion & writing, Researcher identity, Writing as social identity; the reader as significant other

By Anthony Paré

Anthony Paré is a Professor at the University of British Columbia. He’s also an inspiring researcher who took a lead in researching doctoral writing, with wise articles based on practice as well as data.

Who is the speaker of academic texts? What is their relationship to readers? With what authority and conviction do they speak? Is their task to contest, criticize, and rebuke, or is it to cooperate, assist, and collaborate? In scholarly practice, and in the training of students, is academic discourse regarded as a field of combat, where opponents’ positions are attacked and one’s own arguments advanced triumphantly? Or do we approach academic writing as a fundamentally social act through which understanding and knowing are built collectively?

Since I believe that knowledge-making is a social enterprise that depends on collaborative work, these are questions I’ve frequently considered over many years of teaching and studying writing, and they were the questions I addressed in my presentation at the recent International Academic Identities Conference in Hiroshima, Japan. The Conference theme was The Peaceful University: Aspirations for academic futures – compassion, generosity, imagination, and creation, a powerful and poignant theme in a city that experienced such horrendous violence in August, 1945. In this blog entry, I offer the written version of that talk.