Doctoral writing: Why bother?

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

By Susan Carter

Recently a colleague posed this question to academics: ‘your research and publication–why bother?’ Now that sounds sullen and disenchanted, but it is a great question for drawing out what really matters about research. This post considers why we bother doing doctoral writing as students and carefully supporting it as academics.

It’s based on a workshop for doctoral candidates with a twofold purpose. The first was about emotion, to vent about the tribulations of doctoral writing for catharsis (and bonding, according to Mewburn, 2011) and then turn to listing positive reasons for doing this work as a motivational exercise. The other is to emphasise that throughout the thesis the reasons why the research matters should be overtly stated in writing, specifically in the introduction and the conclusion.

In a two hour workshop with doctoral students from several disciplines we first worked through the disenchantment inherent in ‘oh, why bother?’, making space for shared griping about what is bothersome about doctoral research and writing. People talked about what seemed hard to them at the time.

Then candidates moved to individually answer that question. The answers to ‘why bother?’ had to be accurate, not exaggerated or understated. There was a tendency for understatement, which is common, given that often it seems socially inept to tell people how important your own work is, and that allowed us to talk about the way that defending the doctorate required stating its significance. Group peer review ensured perfect iteration so that the right wording for inclusion in the thesis was sharp and persuasive.

My own belief is that we are hugely privileged to spend time on a research project and acquiring the advanced literacy skills that enable communicating what it means to others who are likely to be interested. I think of the very bright people I know trapped in boring jobs, perhaps with family responsibilities that mean they haven’t got the possibility to do a doctorate. I know many doctoral students have similar pressures in their lives, but somehow within their own resources they find a way to keep their career moving forward and their minds keen as they learn. Not everyone can.

Here is a list of reminders about what doctoral writing can do for you:

• Finding an academic voice helps define who you are and what matters to you; it is an act of self creation;
• Gaining a sophisticated level of literacy that will be useful in the future;
• Finally figuring rules about grammar and even appreciating their logic;
• Writing passages that are really satisfying in their clarity and cleanness;
• Realising that writing is often flowing more easily;
• Joining a distinct discourse community;
• Gaining an ability to mentor others;
• Widening future career opportunities; and
• Becoming a stronger person who can manage their own emotions and the large writing project.

Many doctoral students are the first in their family to venture so far into education, and as they write, they write possible further success for future generations into their family’s history and repertoire. For some, passion about making the world a better place drives them as doctoral writers; they may be tackling big challenges or smaller ones, but know that they join the legions of humans who work in different ways to make things better.

This blog often acknowledges the challenges of doctoral writing, the way that feedback can be demoralising, that outside pressures can really squeeze, and that the pedantry and perfectionism of academic writing can baffle and irritate. We comment on these kinds of things because we know they can be bothersome. ‘Why bother?’ may often rise out of irritation, or self-doubt or self-pity from doctoral students or the academics who support their writing.

I’d like to gently suggest that most routes through life are harder than doing a doctorate, harder because they are more limited, smaller, and less full of potential. But it can be productive to take a moment to take this question to heart and to formulate a response that reminds one of the joys and benefits of the challenge. It is good to take ‘why bother’ literally, too, and articulate in the thesis so that there is no doubt that the project was worth doing, worth a doctorate, and that the original contribution is significant.

In the introduction and conclusion of the doctorate students could be encouraged to answer further questions with careful detail.

• Why did you take up this research?
• What was the problem that motivated you to seek a solution, or partial solution?
• Who were hurt by that problem?
• What was hard for you in this research project and what gave you the impetus to keep going?
• How does your research mitigate the problem or fill in a gap in knowledge or understanding?
• Who will benefit from your research findings?
• Might benefits be wider, in that your methods would work with other problems, or for practitioners in other disciplines?
• What gaps in knowledge or understanding still exist?

Supervisors probably need a different set of prompts, but might remember that whenever we work supportively with someone else’s writing, we learn more about what works and what doesn’t, and how we can mentor as part of making the world a better place through research and its writing. I’m always at risk of arriving at a happy ending, and am doing it again here, but would ask for contributions to share ways that we can help each other to know why we bother, and that it does matter. What is your response to ‘doctoral writing; why bother’?

Mewburn, I. (2011). Troubling talk: Assembling the PhD candidate. Studies in Continuing Education. Available at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/0158037X.2011.585151?src=recsys

 

 

 

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Who says in academic writing: ‘I’, ‘the researcher’, ‘this study’, ‘this thesis’…?

Tags

Staying realistic with writing

By Susan Carter

Choosing terms for the agent in academic writing can be tricky for novices, and in my experience, not all supervisors give wise advice on the terms to use for the speaking author. This post considers choice from the perspective of textual clarity. ‘I argue that…’ could also be ‘this thesis argues that…’ or ‘the researcher argues that…’ Doctoral students must decide what nomenclature is best for their research projects.

Some writing shies away from admitting there is an author. Historically, empirical science disciplines sought objectivity; to do so, they chose to hide human agency with passive constructions, e.g., ‘It was found that’. With humans eliminated, arguments were muted, not acknowledged in text: ‘results may suggest that….’ Textual masking of agency signaled a positivist epistemology.

By disappearing the people from the text, the matter of the research itself is emphasised, since, in theory, anyone could duplicate the study, and a measure of objectivity is established. Thus, the use of ‘I’ would be almost misleading for empirical study, in line with the grammatical idea that the passive construction makes the receiver of action, not the doer, important.

In common speech, we use the passive less often than we use the active; its most common use is when we don’t know or care who did something or wish to avoid naming them for social reasons: ‘someone has taken my lunch’ means that I am not accusing anyone in particular.

We also use it when the topic of our focus is the object of an active sentence: ‘these people have been invaded in their homeland, raped, tortured and mass murdered ’ or ‘she was given a bunch of flowers.’ Then we need not name the doer because they are not important for the point we want to make: the focus is on the object of the main verb not the doer of it.

And yet, this is a convention undergoing change. I propose it is softening, as my data showed in Carter 2008, when no doctoral examiner [n23] from any discipline was averse to the use of ‘I’ in a thesis. And I believe that it should soften purely in the interest of readability. When it is not done very well, the results are unreadable. For me, the text of the thesis, its clarity and accessibility, matters too.

Active verbs, the ones we commonly use in speech, are easier to unpack. ‘I’m going for lunch’ makes instant sense, whereas ‘Lunch is to be gone for by me’ is awkward. Then when sentences are conveying something more complex than that ‘I’m off for lunch’, they can be a hard to read. (This is not to be dismissive of simple passives focusing on the objects of verbal action, as in ‘Every year, thousands of people are killed on the roads.’) For research to be replicable, you need to be able to easily read and accurately understand what the researchers did.

Another option for agency is for the writer to refer to herself in the third person as the ‘author’ or the ‘researcher’. I’m not sure of the epistemology behind this convention but it seems to me like a fusion of social science constructivism and hard science positivism. There are people, but they are part of the matter of the study, and the author thus distances herself as thesis writer from herself as researcher.

When I am examining or reviewing, I dislike the convention of an author writing about herself in the third person because it causes textual ambiguity. Commonly in the discussion, the research of the thesis project is compared with findings from other literature. More than once, as a reader I have had to read three times to figure out whether ‘the researcher found’ refers to the researchers of the last-mentioned piece of literature or the authorial candidate.

An option that allows for active verb construction and readability while keeping people out of the way is to allow the thesis, the chapter, or the findings to speak. ‘This chapter’ can review, analyse, or theoretically position the project. ‘This thesis’ may even argue. It is oddly anthropomorphic but does accord with different criteria–including mine, one shared by many examiners, that a thesis ought to be clear and easy to read. My preferences are not necessarily constructivist, but emerge quite simply from respect for readable academic writing.

That’s my approach. I’m sure others will have quite different approaches, or more to add here, and I’m curious as to what your experience has been with the issue of ‘who says’ the thesis.

Carter, S. (2008). Examining the doctoral thesis: A discussion. Innovations in Education and Teaching International, 45(4), 365-374.

 

Disaster and change of plan for doctoral writing

Tags

Staying realistic with writing, writing skills development

By Susan Carter

Horror stories sometimes circulate about disasters that struck doctoral research. Pat Cryer (2003: 213-215) lists examples of doctoral projects that hit walls and how they were salvaged through modification to timely completion.

Sometimes this really does occur. It can be that once the thesis is almost drafted, a new publication comes out seeming to cover the same ground. Publications may also produce new evidence that debunks a doctoral approach to the topic.

Controlling the emotion of doctoral writing and supervision

Tags

Emotion & writing, Staying realistic with writing, Writing as social identity; the reader as significant other

By Susan Carter

Several triggers prompt this post. One is my own data from a set of questionnaires seeking supervisor experience [n226]: frustration, anger, despair and resentment came through significantly. So did supervisors’ perception of how hard it is to give constructive feedback when doctoral students respond with alarmingly negative emotion. The causes of student emotion were also anatomised. This confirms findings with data from 36 doctoral students and 29 supervisors (Aitchison, Catterall, Ross, & Burgin, 2012).

The second was a conversation with a doctoral student colleague. Usually our talk is cheerful and agreeable. But when it came to her doctorate (she’s at the end of her third year) and her inability to write, we stopped the conversation, both cautious about a sense of rising emotion and difference of perspective.

She described how it is simply not her style to crank out writing—she wants to be innovative and do something special, but that causes indecision and she is not progressing. I was firm that she had to find a way to just get on and do it. She looked hot and bothered. I was too—why couldn’t my intelligent colleague see she needed to apply the lovely grounded logic she usually showed in her work? She sounded increasingly ditzy; I sounded increasingly authoritarian. Neither of us wanted to be like that, so we changed the subject.

The third prompt was a different conversation about teaching, and the way that to some extent a teacher’s expertise limits their teaching skill if they don’t take heed of their students’ perspective. Often we teachers need to consciously remember to define terms or acronyms that are household words in our own minds, or explain connections. Threshold concept theory pins down the fact that each discipline has some hard concepts that are obstacles to learner progression—teachers do well to carefully explain these once they recognise what the learner problem is likely to be. I think this principle applies to doctoral emotion, where supervisors have difficulty remembering the emotions of being a doctoral writer.

As an academic now of some years standing, I don’t get emotional about writing. I know I need to do it; it’s part of my job. I like doing it more than much of the work I do each week, but even when writing is not a pleasure, it is still a job that I am responsible for completing. And I expect to be hammered by reviewers, including kindly peers. I see writing feedback as a gift (Guerin, 2014) even though, like others, I mutter abuse when reviewers seem to want to colonise my articles with their own voice or their own approach.

The gift of rigorous feedback takes some getting used to. Gifts like chocolates cause pleasure, but are not that good for you, nor, as a gift, do they show real engagement with who you uniquely are. When the gift of feedback includes a real pounding, it is like deep tissue massage and acupuncture: it hurts, but usually it helps and feels so much better later. So I am aware of harbouring unkind thoughts when doctoral students appear to be drama queens about how impossible it is to write. Although I am outwardly patient, I know inside that all I want to do is find a means of getting them writing again. I want them to learn to handle emotion, control it and move to where they see it as just part of the weird career choice they have made: to become proficient in academic literacy.

Supervisors are usually more aware than their doctoral students of the need to take a practical, workerly stance to writing. We forget that the construction of identity through voice can be deeply troublesome. As a friendly colleague, I was able to simply back out of an emotionally charged conversation—as a supervisor, I cannot. As a supervisor, I express empathy so as not to seem monstrous, but I’m always looking for the opening to move the student back into productivity as soon as possible, with ‘why don’t you try….’ Probably there is always an emotional disconnect between how the student and the supervisor feel whenever student writing stalls.

Do other academics have a way of working with student emotion itself? If supervisors talk overtly about the emotional stress of self-creation through writing, would that help to move the student through that stress, or provide justification for continued non-productivity? Should doctoral students think about supervisor emotions, or does that just heighten the power inequity? Any suggestions? Comments or other posts on this topic would be welcome.

Works Cited

Aitchison, Claire, Catterall, J, Ross, P. I., & Burgin, S. (2012). ‘Tough love and tears’: learning doctoral writing in the sciences. Higher Education Research & Development, 31(4).

Guerin, Cally. (2014). The gift of writing groups: Critique, community and confidence. In C. Aitchison & C. Guerin (Eds.), Writing Groups for Doctoral Students and Beyond (pp. 128-141). Oxon and New York: Routledge.

 

 

A flurry of conferences heading towards Christmas

Tags

Conferences, Emotion & writing, Staying realistic with writing

By Claire Aitchison, Cally Guerin & Susan Carter

This will be our final post for 2015, and we are finishing with a celebration of the wider academic community that provides us with something like professional family. In the last month we have attended three conferences. It is seasonal to speak of three wise men at Christmas: our conferences are stand-in equivalents. We share the insights we drew from these recent gatherings.

AALL

At the end of November, Cally and Claire attended the 12th Biennial Conference of the Association for Academic Language and Learning (AALL) at the University of Wollongong, near Sydney, Australia. The conference brought together over 200 academic language developers from Australia and overseas consortium bodies in Canada, New Zealand and the UK.

Presentations covered a diverse set of interests including, for example:

• the sharing of institutional practices and programs, such as online provision embedding academic literacies into curricula
• assessment and alignment, program evaluation, data analytics
• peer learning and critical pedagogies, rural students
• academic writing theories and practices
• entry and transition experiences including testing and support, VET student transitions
• international students; prior experiences, western approaches
• postgraduate student writing and supervisor development.

In addition, the three keynote speakers provided stimulating perspectives:

Ronald Barnett, Emeritus Professor of Higher Education at the Institute of Education, London, gave a counter-discourse to the ‘skills’ push advocating more holistic possibilities for universities through an ecological curriculum; Associate Professor Cath Ellis, Associate Dean (Education) for the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of New South Wales, challenged us to consider the role of assessment analytics for educational design and delivery. The final day Keynote from Dr Kate Bowles from the University of Wollongong, was a fascinating presentation on a student’s journey using the metaphor of the university as maze.

APCEI

Cally made it to the 7^th Asia Pacific Conference on Educational Integrity (APCEI), held in Albury-Wodonga on 16-18 November, and hosted by Charles Sturt University in association with La Trobe University. The location aptly fitted the theme of “Crossing the borders: new frontiers for academic integrity”, as the cities of Albury and Wodonga also sit opposite each other on either side of the New South Wales and Victorian state borders in Australia.

At first glance, one might assume that “crossing the borders” from educational integrity into unethical behaviours of academic misconduct, plagiarism and cheating have little relevance to doctoral writing. Disappointingly this is not so, and the conference keynotes included important reminders to PhD candidates and their supervisors about the necessity for maintaining high standards of ethical behaviour in undertaking research. Among others, we heard from Dr Robert Waldersee of the Independent Commission Against Corruption and from Anthony McClaran of TEQSA (the Australian Tertiary Education Quality Standards Agency). Associate Professor Jay Phillips reminded us of the responsibilities of research related to indigenous areas and topics. Associate Professor Cath Ellis from the University of New South Wales presented her insights on “contract cheating”; this was an eye-opener, and detailed the extent (and affordability) of the buying of academic texts – including Masters and doctoral theses.

This conference revealed the careful work currently being undertaken in Australia to develop effective university policies and procedures that can respond fairly and consistently to the challenges of a digital world. As with any conference, Cally was able to attend only a tiny percentage of the presentations in parallel sessions. Highlights for her were hearing more about Ursula McGowan’s influential work on the importance of teaching the skills of appropriate referencing and citation; Judith Bannister’s explanation of copyright law in Australia and how it relates to authorship and ownership; and Ruth Walker’s invocation of queer theory to push us to reconsider how and why some writing is sanctioned by the academy while other forms of writing are not.

For those of us working in universities, the issues surrounding educational integrity are critical if we want to develop graduates who attend university not as “consumers” there to buy a product, but as global citizens seeking a transformative education that will prepare them to operate as ethical professionals in their chosen fields.

TERNZ

In New Zealand, Susan attended the Tertiary Education Research New Zealand (TERNZ) conference 25-27 November, hosted by Auckland University of Technology. at their central campus. The TERNZ conference is an unusual one in that papers are discursive: presenters deliver for 10 minutes with the other 40 minutes of the hour given to interactivity. It’s a place where people can bring ideas to show, share, and expect the benefit of practitioner community input. Additionally, attendees are put into groups of about 10 that meet a couple of times each day to share what individuals learned in different sessions, so that each comes away with a wider sense of the ideas exchanged. Consequently this is a friendly conference, a very safe one for novice presenters.

Conference themes in general covered the importance of networking, sharing models and examples, exploring pedagogy that incorporates technology and making the implicit codes of academia more explicit. The detail amongst these themes was rich.

Topics ranged from first year student through to doctoral support, the focus of this brief summary. Deborah Laurs and Susan Carter shared their findings from doctoral students and from supervisors as to their experiences of giving and receiving feedback on writing—they focused discussion on how a guide for supervisors on giving good feedback could allow for individual preference.

One theme was around technology: KwongNui Sim showed the research on how doctoral students use technology that sits behind her recent blog; Jennie Billot and Anaise Irvine considered whether lurkers on blog sites such as their own Thesislink were learning or whether learning required actually engaging in the discussion (the agreed conclusion was that, yes, lurkers do learn, including deep-level learning). E. Marcia Johnson considered best practice for the professional development of doctoral supervisors. Community of practice was another theme, although at this conference it was not central to explorations of doctoral study: it might have been.

Keynote speaker Professor Pare Keiha connected the practicalities and the wonderment of learning, capturing that sense of magic that happens with each learning breakthrough.

Frequently on this site we mull over the challenges of doctoral writing and the learning that is accomplished through that long laborious process—maybe the season might allow us to celebrate the pleasure we get from being part of a rich academic community, and the wonderment of those great times when learning occurs. We’re off for a few weeks now, and wish you the best of the season.

Photos courtesy of MorgueFile

The literature review for beginners: writing while still uncertain

Tags

Staying realistic with writing

By Susan Carter

Writing about literature can cause confusion and frustration for new PhD candidates. How can they start writing a ‘literature review’ in the first few months of candidature when they are still not sure of what they are really looking for, and when they may not have finalised the scope and aims of the thesis?

Despite this, reviewing the literature is commonly the entry point to doctoral writing for many. Frequently it is begun early in the first year in order to stake out the research landscape. Early stage candidates generally work from a preliminary proposal that includes some literature. The main purpose of reading on the topic early is to ensure that their project hasn’t already been done, and to better understand methods commonly used. At the same time, the novice researcher will absorb the jargon and conventions of the discipline, and should be encouraged to do this consciously.

They must at least make notes of what they read so as to avoid forgetting who said what: writing must accompany reading. The more this early writing already includes evidence of their own critical analysis of literature, the more effort will be saved later down the track. It has to be done, but means building a literature review without a sure sense of its final definitive purpose. Some candidates are unnerved by contingency, and purpose for writing can help with that.

Here’s an approach for producing writing that is likely to be usable during a literature review early on when things still seem undecided.

I’ve written on the literature review previously, suggesting that, early on, reading is like a smash and grab or breaking and entering: you need to get in and then out again as quickly as possible, carrying away only what is valuable. A commenter moderated this to the less violent analogy of being a tourist who only takes souvenirs that are 1) valuable and 2) fit in the suitcase. Cally Guerin also has a post (citing Kamler and Thompson 2006), about having attitude when it comes to literature. This time I want to start from a different direction: not the reader’s attitude to the task of reading, but her method in recording findings to make that writing as useful as possible down the track.

I’m basing this on the convention that theses make generic moves, each of which needs support from the literature the candidate reads. The entry-level doctoral student could begin with a plan of the finished thesis or dissertation that factors in how each section of writing will advance the overall argument, and what work literature will need to do to support the final written thesis. The idea is to plot out the story that the literature must detail in, much like developing the storyline of a novel.

The introduction usually establishes a problem, limitation, or lack of understanding. Literature provides evidence that a gap exists in understanding about something that matters, to show its seriousness, and to identify exactly where the gap in knowledge lies that this thesis will fill. That gap is often not clearly defined at the start of the project, especially in non-STEM disciplines. However, any time in literature that the problem in the topic is mentioned, it can be written into a document that will eventually become the first few pages of the introduction. Literature that distinguishes where the problem is worse, or how it is mitigated slightly, or what details affect it (e.g., building material, gender, location, etc.) is also likely to fit under what I would simply call ‘the problem.’ Here, the ‘best’ literature will show that the problem really matters—that will strengthen the thesis in the eyes of readers.

Then the methods used will be defended with literature. Detail about previous approaches will build the argument for methods used—reporting these from the literature requires looking for other studies’ limitations as well as strengths and writing the story of what seems useful and what less so to the current project. Having a set of evaluation criteria in hand enables even early reading to be fitted into a coherent plan, described in a way that is likely to be useable. Chris Hart (1988) spells out the kinds of questions that literature ought to answer. Candidates can work out what questions they need to ask of literature for their own project, and might include criteria like:

• Are any definitions useful?
• Is their problem the same as mine?
• Are their methods good?
• What supports my ideas?
• What raises new ideas or disagrees with mine?
• What are the limitations?

Additionally, they can look at each publication’s prose for models that can be followed. Does it clearly articulate the problem, and the argument? Is it succinct and convincing? How does it defend methods and articulate a methodology? Does it use good vocabulary? How does it handle theory? Strong prose structures at the level of paragraph and sentence can be emulated by novice researchers who are unsure.

If you are in a discipline that uses direct quotation, accumulating useful quotations is essential—and while you are picking those that express ideas eloquently, you can look at syntax for how they achieve this quality. Care with page numbers is essential.

It still won’t be easy, but the candidate could begin by constructing a mock contents page for their future thesis and itemising what literature will be needed in each section gives one way to mitigate the panic that some doctoral students feel when reading and writing while still unsure of their final topic.

References

Hart, Chris. (1998). Doing a Literature Review: Releasing the Social Science Research Imagination. London: Sage Publications, 1998.

Kamer, B. & Thompson, P. (2006). Helping doctoral students write: Pedagogies for supervision. London: Routledge.