Tracking research

Tags

Excel, recording progress, thesis writing

Dr Abigail Winter is a transdisciplinary independent scholar, whose day job is working at the Information Coordinator in QUT’s Reporting and Analysis section. Her research interests vary broadly around the higher education sector, including organisational change management, journalism, student employability, research methods, and teaching and learning. She is an Associate Fellow of the Higher Education Academy (UK) and can be contacted at a.winter@qut.edu.au. Susan Gasson is the Manager of the Research Students’ Centre at QUT. She writes on research methods and HDR issues, including student mobility and internationalisation, and is currently planning her own doctoral research project. In this post they write about their use of Excel to track research writing and reading.

By Abigail Winter and Susan Gasson

I began 2016, as so many previous years, with the intention of becoming more productive. As a bibliophile since the age of about 4 years old, my first place to go was therefore the university library – a haven of wonderful ideas in print form. And, quite literally, a gold mine of brilliance in this case. I found Paul Silvia’s How to write a lot, and devoured it in less than 24 hours, then bought a copy for myself. And it prompted the scheduler that Susan Gasson kindly presented at this year’s Doctoral Writing SIG meeting.

In an almost throw-away fashion, Silvia mentions that he uses a simple database to track his writing each day, as one of his strategies for writing a lot. I took the idea and started by tracking my reading (because that was all I had done for the first fortnight of the year – no writing at that point).

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Leading By Exemplar: The benefits of asking good questions about other people’s writing

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analysing thesis writing, teaching writing, thesis writing, thesis writing manuals, writing skills

Robert B. (Rob) Desjardins, PhD, is the graduate writing advisor at the Student Success Centre, University of Alberta (Canada). Here he explains his insights into how best to help doctoral writers learn about research writing.

By Robert B. Desjardins

Lately I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a new manual for students struggling to craft theses and dissertations. The working title – still in the “playful conceit” stage – is The Incomplete Guide to Thesis-Writing.

Why “incomplete”? It’s a riff on the dangers of authorial hubris, and on the need for writing advice that helps students to start their critical work, rather than promising an easy path to the end. It’s also a tribute to the pedagogical value of the question – a speech act that sets writers on an unpredictable path, making them responsible to define and then contend with the rhetorical problems that a major writing project presents.

Doctoral writing and decision-making in the first few months

Tags

feedback on writing, research questions, thesis writing

By Susan Carter

I’m working with a promising new doctoral student and conversations are mainly around scoping her project. I’ll call her Angel, although she has kept her Chinese name. Our talk circles round the decisions that need to be made in the first year, and preferably in the first few months. It’s a process of thinking, choosing and writing. First, decisions are approached at several different levels.

We begin with identifying the problem that is driving the research. I want her to write that clearly. This leads to how her doctoral project might produce better understanding the problem with a goal to mitigating it. One set of considerations hovering through our talk regards methods and methodology.

What’s the formula for writing a thesis?

Tags

CaRS, IMRAD, thesis formula, thesis writing

by Cally Guerin

Sometimes it seems that doctoral students attend workshops on thesis writing because they are seeking a nice, neat formula to follow. The primary question they want answered is: ‘What’s correct?’ Given all the other pressures on them – to finish on time, to be original, to get research published, etc., etc. – it’s easy to understand the desire to have a simple, straightforward set of rules to follow that will please examiners and journal editors alike. Part of the writing teacher’s job seems to be letting them down softly and helping them realize that it can never be that simple. The route to thesis submission always demands more complicated decision-making along the way; even more challenging, the environment in which those submissions occur is changing rapidly in unpredictable ways.

There is some comfort for those seeking these kinds of formulaic answers, however, in the traditional IMRAD structure of scientific articles: Introduction, Materials and Methods, Results, and Discussion. Unfortunately, this neat acronym neglects to mention the Abstract and Reference sections. And then, the apparently neat separation between different sections turns out to be rather messier for many researchers – is it okay to include some discussion in the Materials and Methods to explain why a non-standard procedure was adopted? Is there always a clear cut-off between Results and Analysis/Discussion if I’m reporting on qualitative research that has already been analysed in order to create some broad organizing themes? If you find yourself looking for useful strategies to work through such complex issues, try Carter, Kelly and Brailsford’s (2012) book, Structuring your research thesis.

Also very popular amongst those looking for instruction is the ‘moves’ approach developed by John Swales and Christine Feak (1996; 2004), otherwise known as the CaRS model (Create a Research Space). This model illuminates the reasoning behind Introductions in research and includes three main moves or positionings: establish a research territory (and make a case for why it matters); establish a niche (and point out a gap in the field); and occupy that niche (by explaining exactly what this new research will add to the field). These ‘moves’ or opening gambits do, of course, work very well in lots of ways, and should not be underestimated as a means to engage readers and demonstrate the value of the research. This approach has been picked up and developed further by many since (see, for example, Cargill & O’Connor 2009; Paltridge and Starfield 2007).

The structures mentioned above provide very useful guidance for novice writers, but will never be enough in doctoral writing. A thesis requires much more nuanced negotiation of the conventions of the discipline. In relation to this, I was greatly heartened to hear Anne Freadman speaking at the Writing Research Across Borders (WRAB) conference recently. Freadman, the doyenne of genre theory, is working at an enviably complex level. I can’t hope to capture the subtleties of her argument here, but one valuable message I took from her presentation was that, basically, writers need to conform to the ‘generic form’ only sufficiently for readers to recognize where their work fits in with the conventions and expectations of genre – they do not need to slavishly imitate or repeat that genre. The real achievement, it would seem, is for doctoral writers to find a balance between what they want to say and the conventions of their discipline that works well enough to communicate precisely the message they aim for. This is always a matter of judgement and can’t be dictated by adherence to strict rules.

Have you found yourself faced with doctoral students who seek easy answers? Or are you a doctoral candidate struggling with the same concerns? What other advice would you offer those trying to find their way through these questions?

Cargill, M. & O’Connor, P. (2009). Writing scientific research articles: Strategy and steps. Oxford UK: Wiley-Blackwell.

Carter, S., Kelly, F. & Brailsford, I. (2012). Structuring your research thesis. Houndsmills UK: Palgrave MacMillan.

Paltridge, B. & Starfield, S. (2007). Thesis and dissertation writing in a second language: A handbook for supervisors. London: RoutledgeFalmer.

Swales, J.M. & Feak, C.B. (1996; 2004). Academic writing for graduate students. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

 

When writing a PhD dissertation in English is “like knitting a sweater without knowing whether there is enough yarn”

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bilingual writers, Danish PhD students, English language writing skills, thesis writing

By Tine Wirenfeldt Jensen, Gitte Wichmann-Hansen and Stacey Cozart, Aarhus University, Denmark.

The globalization of higher education can sometimes be a very abstract concept, a term we keep repeating without it having any real implications for our personal lives in academia. But one aspect of this trend towards globalization does involve one of the most personal areas of all – our language and thereby our very identities. More and more doctoral students are writing their dissertations (as monographs or journal articles) in English – the language of globalization. In Denmark as well as in other Scandinavian countries, this development is often not thought of as an issue: after all, Danish doctoral students generally have such excellent oral skills in English that some are perceived as being bilingual. And when doctoral students interact with their international – non-native English-speaking – peers, their own belief in their superior skills in English is confirmed. But what happens when they take on the task of writing a dissertation in academic English? Does having excellent oral communication skills necessarily mean that writing a dissertation in a foreign language, in a genre that is new to them, is smooth sailing? And if they do encounter difficulties, how are they able to frame and experience these difficulties as doctoral students?

We looked into this question as part of a two-year multi-institutional research seminar focusing on critical transitions in writing in higher education. Our case study focused on the writing experiences and challenges of PhD students at the faculty of Arts at Aarhus University, Denmark. It shows that writing a dissertation in English is, in fact, not without difficulties for PhD students. Even though lots of the students writing in English confidently rate their writing skills as very good or good, almost half state that they do have concerns about writing their dissertation in English.

We asked the students to complete the sentence “Writing in English is like…/Writing in Danish is like…”. Their answers point to the difficulties and insecurities experienced in connection with writing in English. This student answer is an incisive example: While writing in Danish is like “playing a grand piano based on 30 years’ experience”, writing in English is like “beating on a little tin xylophone without any guidance. In the dark.”

Other examples of metaphor pairs for writing in Danish and English are: Writing in Danish is like “…driving on a freeway while my supervisor occasionally tells me to switch to the academic lane”, while writing in English is like “…driving on a freeway with holes in the asphalt”. Writing in Danish is like “…shaping clay”, while writing in English is like “…knitting a sweater without knowing whether there is enough yarn”. Just like the majority of the students’ metaphor pairs, these examples underline the students’ difficulties transitioning from Danish to English, in particular their sense of alienation, inadequacy and lack of creativity in connection with writing in English.

In order to handle these issues, the doctoral students need to be able to assume an identity as “language learner”, but the structural framework of the doctoral programs does not offer a legitimate space for them to do so. There are no mandatory courses in academic English, no formal or informal assessments of students’ writing skills in English, nor any frameworks for discussing students’ writing issues or concerns about writing in English in the doctoral supervision context. No institutional space is made available for discussing these quite complex issues, and if the students want to do so, they must carve out this space individually.

What the institution is communicating to the PhD student who pictures writing in English as ”knitting a sweater without knowing whether there is enough yarn” is that there should be enough yarn – that doctoral students are simply expected to have the ability to write a dissertation in English with little or no support. And – in a sense – that if this is not the case, the students’ “doctoral student” identity is somewhat flawed.

What is striking is how unfounded this expectation is. More than two thirds of the students in our study who stated that they are writing their dissertation in English had never attended a course in academic English, and one third had virtually no experience of writing academic texts in English when they began their PhD studies.

The consequence of these implicit expectations is that the students are very much left to themselves – left to decide what language to write their dissertation in, to assess their own language skills, to seek out courses and other kinds of support on their own. And they are also left alone with the task of negotiating the impact on their self-perception when faced with difficulties writing a dissertation in English – this context can’t allow them to legitimately occupy the space of being a doctoral student and an advanced language learner at the same time.

Importantly, the difficulties these students experience are not the result of a personal shortcoming but of an institutional blind spot toward the idea that even the nearly bilingual Danish PhD students may only be beginning to develop their English academic writing skills. Our study has made it clear to us that understanding the role played by the different identities available to young scholars is crucial. We as institutions, researchers, supervisors and language teachers must work towards making it legitimate for students to assume the identities of advanced language learner and doctoral student at the same time – without the one identity undermining the other.

We would be very interested to hear about similar dilemmas in other contexts.

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All three of our guest authors this week work at Aarhus University in Denmark. They are educational developers within Higher Education, and have extensive experience working with students’ writing processes, text feedback, and doctoral supervision. Together they compose a research team on Doctoral Writing. Tine is a part-time lecturer and PhD student at the Centre for Teaching Development and Digital Media in the Faculty of Arts. Gitte is an associate professor and research manager at the Center for Teaching and Learning, School of Business and Social Sciences. Stacey is a senior consultant with the Centre for Teaching Development and Digital Media at the Faculty of Arts.

Thesis writing: the paradox of same, same but different

Tags

Doctoral writing, thesis writing, writing skills development

By Deborah Laurs

Irrespective of institution, the definition of a PhD is universally recognised as ‘a body of independent and original research,’ generally evidenced by a dissertation of ‘up to 100,000 words’. Hence, while the research is original, the form in which it is presented is, inevitably, a ‘cookie-cutter one-size-for-all approach’. Any Google search of ‘thesis structure’ pulls up the same ingredients—Introduction, Lit Review, Methodology/Research Design, Findings, Discussion, Conclusion.

Doctoral writing, then, by and large, entails a process of presenting original ideas in a markedly unoriginal form. Sure, the actual packaging may differ, depending on whether you’re within the Humanities, Sciences, or creative arts, but the basic ingredients, and—more importantly—the expectations of your audience (read: ‘examiners’) are identical. Even though Hugh Kearns succinctly summarises the thesis chapters as ‘what I know,’ ‘what I’ve read,’ ‘what I did,’ ‘what I’ve found’ and ‘what I reckon,’ it may be difficult for students to sustain confidence in the merits of their research and writing abilities when surrounded by exemplars that are ‘same, same but different’.

‘How to write’ handbooks offer firm guidelines about the requisite ingredients and ‘moves’ each section of the thesis requires in order to lead the reader (the not so gentle examiner) logically through to the conclusion. Yet, frequently, issues associated with attempting to reproduce an original version of a pre-ordained format crop up in the very first tasks, typically the Literature Review and Methodology chapters.

Clearly, surveying the existing body of knowledge is crucial in order to justify the ‘gap’ that the student’s original research seeks to fill. However, the task in itself is highly formulaic, requiring students to appraise a body of knowledge that every other scholar in the field has already reviewed, but to do so from the fresh and unique perspective of how it relates to their own research. Similarly (particularly in the social sciences) a student must establish her ontological and epistemological positioning, rejecting (or espousing) assorted research paradigms in the process. This intellectual journey is likely to result in writing that closely mirrors the writings of the likes of John Cresswell or Yvonna  Lincoln and Norman Denzin, and takes on different voices, usually awkwardly, like an unconvincing ventriloquist.  It is very difficult for emerging researchers to find their own authoritative voice in their writing.

The imitative nature of these tasks is exemplified by the existence of resources such as ‘academic phrase banks’, which contain pre-packaged expressions such as ‘It was decided that the best method to adopt for this investigation was to ….’ or  ‘Previous research tended to suffer from limitations/weaknesses/disadvantages/drawbacks [take your pick] such as…’ Although undoubtedly a useful tool, such templates reduce the thesis to the equivalent of a cloze test, with students needing only to ‘fill-in-the-blanks’ appropriate to the discipline.

As novice thesis writers put their literature reviews together, it’s no wonder that first drafts of lit reviews more often resemble summaries of ‘what I’ve read’ than ‘what these works mean to me’ and research design chapters sound unconvincingly stilted.  In many cases the plethora of voices—and jargon—within the literature overwhelms the student entirely, further exacerbating the paradoxical expectation that their writing demonstrates original thought.

Similarly, the spectre of plagiarism looms large. Early attempts to assimilate other people’s ideas and a sense of being overwhelmed often result in the student not daring to claim any ideas as her own. Prefacing each sentence with ‘According to …’ or ‘Research by …’, or over-reliance on quotations may seem the only safe way to demonstrate sources have been correctly acknowledged. Often first drafts are overly tentative.

Paraphrasing and synthesis are higher order cognitive skills, requiring a thorough understanding of the concept. For many students, this understanding may not transpire until well into the analysis stage, several years hence, which frequently necessitates an associated overhaul of the initial ‘kitchen-sink’ lit review chapter.  Setting novice writers a largely formulaic task with the aim of producing original thought requires careful scaffolding. Original writing requires original thinking, which in itself requires considerable confidence and a clear sense of direction, preparatory to entering into conversation with the biggest names in the field.

As with all writing matters, the main solution is talking—with one’s supervisor, fellow students; even better, talk with family and friends as far removed from the project as possible in order to help the student find her own voice because outsiders will have respect for her expertise compared to their own. But I wonder if others have ways of dealing with the writing tension underpinning the ‘same, same but different’ genre of the thesis.

Deborah Laurs is a senior learning advisor at Victoria, University of Wellington, New Zealand, where she runs research skills seminars and thesis-writing workshops, as well providing one-to-one support to students at all stages of their doctoral journey. In 2010, she was recognized as ‘most influential staff member’ by her university’s postgraduate students’ association, and in 2011, received a  ‘staff excellence’ award. She is co-author of Developing Generic Support for Doctoral Students (in press, due April 2014), Routledge.