Doctoral writing 2023: Where’s this year heading?

Tags

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: How good is good enough?

Tags

final stages of PhD, Staying realistic with writing, writing skills development

By Susan Carter

Commonly there is some uncertainty about when a doctorate is ready for submission. The criteria for a PhD are expressed in rather broad terms. Exactly how patently must critical analysis of literature be demonstrated to reach doctoral standard?  Just how significant must the contribution to knowledge be in a doctoral thesis compared to a masters thesis? How thoroughly must understanding of theory and methodology be shown? This post considers how supervisors and candidates can judge when the doctorate is good enough to face examination.

Doctoral writing: Why bother?

Tags

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

 

 

 

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.